


Nearly Home

by toomuchplor, xenakis



Series: Schmoop Bomb: The Series [1]
Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Adoption, Canon Compliant, Fanart, Inception Big Bang Challenge, Kidfic, M/M, Schmoop
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-14
Updated: 2012-02-14
Packaged: 2017-10-30 20:27:03
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 25,127
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/335732
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/toomuchplor/pseuds/toomuchplor, https://archiveofourown.org/users/xenakis/pseuds/xenakis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>Ndoto haihadithiwi</i> ~ You can’t name a dream.</p><p>- Swahili Proverb</p><p>Arthur and Eames are on the verge of giving up mind crime when Cobb convinces Arthur to be his point man on one last job — which rather inevitably goes wrong.  Eames is pulled into the mess as Cobb’s simple heist spirals into an attempt on inception.  It’s time to stop trespassing on the dreams of others; building a home takes two sets of hands.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Nearly Home

**Author's Note:**

> **Author's Notes:**
> 
>  
> 
> Some small bits of dialogue are lifted from the film.
> 
> The text contains a little bit of Swahili, but in the interests of keeping the story flowing I've only footnoted the bits that might not have obvious translations from the context. Also, other than having sung a few songs from eastern Africa, I speak no Swahili; I am relying on numerous Swahili language resources (not Google Translate, I promise!) to provide the dialogue, but of course there may be errors which remain. (If anyone reading this can actually correct the Swahili found herein, please let me know. I would adore the use of your skill set.) 
> 
> I’ve never — yet — been to Kenya but have several good friends who have travelled there as well as professional acquaintances from the country; as such, most of the setting in Mombasa is an amalgam of my own experiences in other parts of subsaharan Africa, anecdotal research from people I know, and good old-fashioned book-learning type research. I do not, however, pretend to be anything like an expert on the culture and layout of Mombasa. Any mistakes in this area are entirely mine and should probably be taken in the spirit of this being a story about a world where dream heist is a thing, i.e. not exactly set in cold hard fact anyway.
> 
> Title is from “Nearly Home” by Broken Records. 
> 
> Thanks to Lately, who is a kick-ass editor/beta/audiencer, and to stars_collected, who read along and laughed at all my jokes (as well as suggesting one or two of the better ones herself.) Thanks also to Xen, who — in addition to producing amazing art for this story — was the one who convinced me to sign up for Inception Big Bang in the first place, offered to do artwork, and sent me sketches of Eames being adorable with a baby in a snuggly carrier until I bashed my brain into producing some set of circumstances where I could write convincing canon-based (to me, anyway) baby!fic in Inception fandom. And she managed to do all this while being completely chill and easygoing about the whole thing, even when I dropped out at the eleventh hour for lack of even a starting point for the story. She was chill when I opted back in five days later with about 15K words. In short, she is the reason I’m writing this. Love ya, bb.
> 
>  
> 
> **Artist's Notes:**
> 
>  
> 
> Many thanks to Yue-ix, who has developed some kind of freaky art beta sixth sense, for which I am eternally grateful. Endless glompage to Plor, for the utter delight that was making this with her. I would offer my firstborn, but if there's one thing we've learned from this whole adventure, it's that we prefer kids that are not ours, or better yet, entirely fictional :P <3 <3 <3
> 
>  **Art masterpost:** [DW](http://xenakis.dreamwidth.org/74935.html) | [LJ](http://users.livejournal.com/xenakis_/66989.html)
> 
>  **Content Notes:** Domestic fic, complete with (eventual) baby. Consider yourself warned.

Nothing puts a crick in your neck like being curled up in the boot of a Volvo for seven hours, Eames decides, trying and failing to rub the knots out of the tendons just under his right ear. " _Simama hapa_ ," he says, snapping to attention as the cabbie nearly rolls right past Eames' house. " _Asante_." He passes the agreed fare over the seat, shilling notes crumpled from long abuse at the bottom of his shoulder bag. He's been away for too many weeks.

There's a cozy orangey light shining faintly in the front window. It's barely early evening but the sun's almost down. Life on the equator, Eames reminds himself. In Norway the sun barely sets at all, this time of year. 

Eames nods a greeting at the local security guard and finds a fresh burst of energy to lope up the two steps to the house, unlocking first the steel barred door, then the three deadbolts on the standard front door behind it. The alarm beeps cheerfully to announce Eames' entrance. The air smells like gravy and peas: home, home, home. Eames lets his duffel and his shoulder bag thump down onto the floor, upsetting a stack of flattened boxes leaning up against the wall. He beams helplessly.

"What's all that cardboard rubbish doing in the foyer?" he asks when he comes into the kitchen, sniffing hopefully at the air.

Arthur doesn't look up from the pot he's stirring. His hair is shorter, neatly shaved at the nape of his neck. He's wearing a red checked shirt with the sleeves rolled up and a pair of dark wash Levi's. You'd never guess, looking at him, that it's thirty degrees outside and humid as Satan's armpit. "It's waiting for you to cut it down and take it out to the bin," he answers, and lifts up a spoon with a piece of potato balanced on it. "Tell me if this is cooked through."

Eames sips at the spoon, burns his lips and tongue, hisses air around the red hot coal of the potato in his mouth, manages to bite down. "Cooked through," he agrees, fanning his mouth, swallowing. "I meant, what were the boxes from?"

"I'll show you later," says Arthur, unrepentant, dimpling.

"What's wrong with now?" Eames asks, but it's a silly question when Arthur's already reaching out and sliding one fingertip under the edge of Eames' collar.

They'd long ago given up on the idea of reunion sex as being anything much more than sort of frantic and unhinged, so Eames isn't surprised when Arthur skips over the part where they get undressed and just crowds Eames back against the counter, pulls his trousers open, jerks him off right there while Eames shudders and lets his head fall back and tries to think of ways to distract himself into lasting more than a minute and a half. It's no use, of course; Arthur is overwhelming after they've been apart so long, and he knows it. Eames sweats and curses and comes over Arthur's bared forearm, and then returns the favour while Arthur breathes shakily into Eames' open mouth. Arthur anchors himself with a hand at the small of Eames' back even though the counter is as close, and a good sight steadier.

They tidy up with paper towel and eat dinner standing up, too edgy yet to settle into the routine of the dining table, the stillness of it. As they chew Eames bitches about the shitty job he'd just wrapped up. Arthur makes all the right noises of indignation and then, because he's Arthur, tells Eames he's stupid for working with Balzac the Ballsack again.

"Still better than Cobb the Knob," Eames returns with equanimity, and Arthur's face does something complicated in reaction, and that — that's a conversation Eames will gladly stow for later, because they always row when it's about Cobb and Eames doesn't want to have a domestic while he still smells of Volvo car boot and ten hours on an aeroplane. "What about this cardboard you've left out for me?" Eames asks, changing subjects.

"Oh, right," says Arthur, "well, I ordered a few things." The consternation of a moment earlier evolves abruptly into a kind of skittishness that Eames recognizes, the kind that Arthur always displays after a bout of ill-advised shopping. Eames treats Arthur to a narrow stare.

"Don't make me institute the one-in-one-out rule about your bloody shoes again," Eames says. "We only just got your closet down to a few dozen pairs."

"Not for me," Arthur hastens to protest. "No, not for me." He sets his bowl down in the sink and gestures down the corridor. "Come on, I'll show you."

When Eames had left, the spare room had been freshly cleared of Arthur's surplus clothing, having served its function as a bonus closet for two years. It hadn't been much to look at, last Eames saw it: four whitewashed plaster walls, a scratched-up hardwood floor, and a single lightbulb serving as the only source of illumination. Dust on the windowsill, half the baseboards missing.

Arthur, it seems, has had a productive six weeks.

"Darling," says Eames, leaning in the doorway, stunned.

"Once I started," Arthur says embarrassedly, "I — I got carried away. I'm not very good at downtime, you know that."

Eames steps inside, feeling as though he's entering one of Arthur's dreamscapes because everything is so elegant, so perfectly arranged, so lovely. The walls are freshly painted with a sort of deep-hued Saracen red, the floor refinished and stained walnut with white baseboards around its margins. The overhead light is muted, on a dimmer switch. The window is doubly guarded from the outside light with heavy bamboo blinds and sage drapes. There's a small chest of drawers, a little bookshelf, a wooden chest, and against the far wall there's a crib that must have been designed by the love child of Frank Lloyd Wright and Arne Jacobsen, chocolate finished wood that gleams like a piano lid, fitted out with the world's most tasteful cream-coloured baby linens. 

"Do you think it's gender neutral enough?" Arthur asks anxiously. "I don't — I know my taste tends towards the masculine but I was thinking we could easily change out the linens for something with a bit of eyelet lace edging and maybe—"

Eames circles around, not really listening, and finally settles in the rocking chair he hadn't noticed at first glance, takes in the nursery from this new vantage point. The dresser has a changing pad on it. There's a wicker basket piled with neatly folded cloth nappies, and for some reason, that's what drives it home for Eames. "Oh my god," he bursts out, his words bumping up against Arthur's, stopping Arthur short. "We're really having a fucking baby, aren't we?"

"So you've been telling me," Arthur replies with a hint of amusement. "Are you — do you like it, then?"

"Yes, but," Eames manages, still stunned, "Arthur. A _baby_. Babies are, like, very small people." He holds out his hands in demonstration of the alarming smallness of babies. "We're having one."

Arthur frowns. "I'm not sure I'm equipped to manage this panic attack. I'm still sort of in the middle of my own."

Eames lurches up from the rocking chair — no easy or graceful feat, and one that wrenches his sore neck terribly besides — and goes over to the chest of drawers, tugs open the topmost drawer, sees the folded pairs of sleepers, the tiny rolled socks, the pastel rainbow of onesies.

"If you go for your totem I'm going to have to punch you in the face," Arthur says, strained.

Eames pulls his hand back out of his trouser pocket and forces a shit-eating grin, shoves down his rising sense of disbelief. "If this is a dream, I don't want to wake," he begins, and then has to stop because Arthur might punch him just for that, going by his expression. "It's marvellous," he revises. "I look forward to many idyllic hours of fecal matter disposal in this very spot."

Arthur doesn't bother smiling back, just loops an arm around Eames' waist and rests his chin on Eames' shoulder. "We'll be fine," he says, sounding unconvinced. "It's just a matter of being prepared."

"Right, absolutely," Eames responds with equally lukewarm heartiness. "Besides, we've weeks left to get things sorted, and nothing but time now that I'm done that fucking shitshow of a Norwegian job with Balzac."

Arthur's jaw goes tense against Eames' shoulder. "About that," he says, and stops.

Cobb the Bloody Fucking Knob.

 

Eames preempts the argument again, pleading the desperate need for a shower and a proper shag before they can discuss whatever fresh horror Cobb's prepared for Arthur. There's no question of it being a terrible plan; Cobb now rarely seems to originate any other kind, and his growing instability has alienated all the steadiest people in the business, which leaves him with only Arthur: maddeningly loyal reliable Arthur.

But those thoughts go aside while Eames stands under the scalding needle-sharp spray of Arthur's glorious German-engineered shower head, scrubbing away six weeks of cheap Scandinavian hotel soap. He keeps the thoughts carefully aside as he shaves, afterwards, and sequesters them even more fiercely when he finally emerges from the steam-clouded bathroom and finds Arthur naked save for his iPad, which he's probably using to purchase more obscenely overpriced baby clobber. 

(Eames can't argue about Arthur's baby-related purchases, however; Arthur's fears about the inherent tackiness of parenthood had been one of the hardest obstacles to overcome and had only been soothed through a focused campaign of emailing Arthur links to the poshest and most killingly tasteful baby outfitters Eames could find. For better or worse, their sprog is going to be clothed and carried in the baby equivalents of haute couture and fine furnishing. It's part of the bargain they'd finally struck several months ago.)

Arthur glances up from the iPad, casts an appreciative eye over Eames' physique, which is invariably improved by weeks of abstinence; sexual frustration, for Eames, is best sublimated by long hours in the nearest gym.

Eames can't resist dropping his towel and striking a Hercules pose.

Arthur rolls his eyes but dimples obligingly anyway. "Get over here," he says.

Eames turns, bends one knee, flexes his arm.

"Get over here and fuck me," Arthur revises, setting the iPad aside. He means business, now.

Eames gets over to the bed and fucks Arthur: fucks him slow and sweet for a while — face to face with Arthur on his back, knees by his ears — and then fucks him with somewhat less elegance, harder, faster, Arthur facedown and arse-up and kept from colliding with the headboard by virtue only of his grip on the wall in front of him. Finally Eames pulls out and flips Arthur over, sucks him off with three fingers holding him open still, and then jerks himself until he spills white and vulgar over the tan lean planes of Arthur's belly.

"We can talk about it tomorrow," Arthur says when Eames collapses down beside him, knackered and dizzied by the loveliness of whatever amazingly fey linen scent Arthur always uses on their sheets.

"You're far too coherent," Eames grouses, rubbing his face back and forth on his pillow, filling his head up with the feel and smell of home. "I'll sort you out again in the morning."

"I'm sorted out," Arthur says, tidying them up, snapping off the bedside lamp, yanking the covers up over Eames because of course he'd thought to turn down the duvet before splaying over the mattress like a wonderful slag. "I'm just not jet-lagged off my ass like you."

"You bought nappies," says Eames drowsily, warm and sated and soothed by the soft whirr of the air conditioner, the faint shush of Mombasa traffic outside. It's his last utterance, and indeed his last thought, before sleep tugs him under.

 

It's only a couple of hours' time difference between Oslo and Mombasa but the lengthy flight between the two is exhausting enough that Eames has a bit of a lie-in the next morning without planning to. He wakes up around ten o'clock and bumbles into the kitchen to find Arthur midway through assembling some sort of satellite launch pad. Joy, their incongruously-named cleaner and cook, has arrived for the day. She takes a plate of warmed sausages and baked beans from the oven and clatters it down onto the countertop by way of greeting.

" _Habari ya asubuhi_ ,"1 Eames chirps back at her, amused. Joy disapproves of Eames on principle, even though she worked for him long before Arthur ever arrived on the scene: wonderful, tidy, unpicky Arthur. Eames sits down at the kitchen table and tucks in, keeping a weather eye on Joy as she goes about cleaning the kitchen, mostly focusing his attention on the delightful sight of Arthur frowning at Danish instructions and fitting screws and bolts into pre-drilled holes. "Is there more coffee?" Eames dares to ask once he's finished his breakfast.

"Mr. Arthur drank the last cup," says Joy, making it sound like it had possibly been the last cup of coffee in Kenya.

"Do you mind making another pot, Joy?" Arthur asks absently. He doesn't have to flash a smile or use a Swahili turn of phrase or anything; he just asks, calm and polite. Joy spoons beans into the burr grinder without the slightest hesitation, all because Arthur remembers to hang up his towel and never takes the Lord's name in vain, even when he stubs his toe or burns his finger.

Arthur lifts a weird assemblage of parts from the floor and turns it over, fits it into another weird assemblage of parts, and abruptly the satellite launch pad morphs into a highchair. "Won't need it for a while yet," Arthur says, satisfied, "but it's better than leaving the box lying around for months."

Eames makes what he hopes are appropriately admiring noises and lunges for the mug of coffee the moment Joy holds it out to him. The coffee is black and scalding and far far superior to the swill Balzac had provided in the abandoned health clinic where they'd been based.

"Joy, could you please move on to the rest of the house for a while?" Arthur asks quietly, refilling his own mug, coming over to sit down at the table. "Eames and I need a minute."

Probably she's hoping that Arthur's about to toss him out on his arse, Eames supposes, judging by the spring in her step; if she only knew what Arthur's planning she'd be far more worried about it going the other way round.

"I don't need to hear the sob story he fed you," Eames begins, already grumpy.

"It's not a sob story," Arthur protests, matching Eames' tone, slumping back in his chair, immediately petulant in response. It's like this sometimes, being married: having the same fucking quarrel over and over. They've gotten to the point where they can jump right into the middle of it and have it over with a little sooner, at least. "Eames, you know he needs my help."

Eames sighs and sets his coffee down, rubs his temples. "Just — tell me what the job is."

Arthur shifts forward again, props his elbows on the table and his chin on his folded hands: bracing for impact. "It's Cobol Engineering," he says grimly.

"No fucking way," Eames declares, jaw dropping in horror. "Arthur! They're headquartered in Pretoria! Kenya's their backyard. The job goes sideways and we're out a fucking — a fucking _home_ , a _life_."

"I realize that," Arthur returns, voice tight and miserable, and he looks up to meet Eames' gaze, to better plead his case. "Listen, it's just a basic extraction on an unmilitarized mark, some top-level engineer, and it's really good money. Cobb needs the cash."

"Who's building?" Eames demands, shaking his head with disbelief.

"Nash," says Arthur, and it's evident by the way he says it that he knows he's not helping his case.

"Nash?" Eames repeats, disgusted. " _Nash_ , Arthur? That miserable weaselly little git? He couldn't build a ladder to keep himself from drowning in a wading pool."

"I know, he's," Arthur says, frustrated, balling his hands into fists on the surface of the table. "Cobb's already got Nash, is the thing. If I don't"—

—"Fucking fuck," Eames spits out, annoyed as hell. "This is really dodgy timing, Arthur. Natasha's due in, what, nine weeks?"

"It's a cakewalk, I swear to god," Arthur says earnestly, leaning in. "Eames, it's the last — I told Cobb, it's the very last time. After this he's on his own, okay? He just needs to pay back MacPherson for getting him out of that customs scrape in Bali last month, and then he's going to be okay for a while."

"Then he's going to find himself a new point," Eames corrects Arthur, voice biting and precise.

"Then he's going to get a new point, yeah," Arthur agrees, repeating back Eames' words in a coaxing calming tone. He reaches across and lays his hand over Eames' own. "A week, tops. And it's in Pretoria so I won't be far away."

"We were meant to be done," Eames reminds Arthur none too gently, but he's already lost the argument and he knows it. It's typical, that Arthur's most vexing trait is also one of his most charming. For a criminal, he really does have the most appalling sense of loyalty.

"We will be done," Arthur says, sitting back in his chair all at once, recognizing his victory. "Eames, this is the last time."

 

Arthur leaves the next morning. The job goes sideways.

"Tokyo," Eames echoes back to Arthur, scrubbing the heel of his hand into his eye socket. He's going to kill Cobb.

"Turns out this guy Saito is the one we need to extract from," Arthur says over the phone line. "But Cobb's got a plan, okay?

"Oh, well," Eames says, sarcastic, "if _Cobb_ —"

—"Another week, that's all," says Arthur. "I'm sorry."

 

"He hasn't left me," Eames tells Joy, because she's been casting dirty looks his way for three days now. "He's away on business."

She lifts her eyebrows doubtingly and goes back to hoovering.

"He would hardly leave without his favourite Dior tie, would he?" Eames hollers over the noise, irritated.

 

Left to his own devices, Arthur had fully renovated and decorated the nursery, gotten their nest properly feathered. Before he'd fucked off to Pretoria-whoops-nope!-Tokyo, he'd drawn up a list for Eames, things that still needed doing, things like "buy wipes" and "more burp cloths" and "find microwave sterilizer" and "no clothes with ears attached, Eames, I mean it."

Left to _his_ own devices, Eames buys wipes and dutifully checks them off the list, bungs them down on the dresser in the nursery, feeling smug and accomplished and adult. Three days later, Arthur's in sodding Japan, and Eames decides against locating burp cloths in Mombasa. Instead he locks himself in their attic and spends five days painstakingly forging four million shillings' worth of poker chips. If they're still being criminals after all, Eames wants to at least have his share of the fun.

 

He's putting the finishing touches on the last batch of ten thousand shilling chips, a little dizzy from the fumes of paint and lacquer and resin, when his mobile trills with the ringtone assigned to Arthur.

"How did it go, darling?" Eames asks, going over to open the attic window wider, his braces slapping loose against his thighs where he'd shrugged them off hours earlier.

"Very badly," Arthur says, and he sounds exhausted and unhappy, and abruptly Eames can't bring himself to scold or berate Arthur at all; abruptly Eames feels like an utter shit for spending all this time forging chips instead of finding out how the fuck one sterilized a microwave anyway. Arthur's doing what he feels is right, after all. "I can't talk long," Arthur continues, "our ride's getting here in ten minutes."

"What happened?" Eames asks, pushing the windowpane out further, reaching over the edge to grab at the hidden squashed packet of fags they each pretend the other doesn't know about. They've given up smoking for the baby, after all. Eames perches on the windowsill with one thigh, taps out a cigarette.

"Mal showed up," Arthur sighs. "Tipped off the mark that he was dreaming and then took out my kneecap as a bonus. And _then_ Nash screwed the pooch on the first level, his usual shoddy fucking shortcuts." There's a faint pause during which Eames makes out the sound of Arthur flicking a lighter of his own. He's really stressed, then, if he's smoking on the job. "We had to bolt and now we're scattering. No pay day, of course. Plus, Cobol wants our heads on a fucking —" He breaks off abruptly, and he doesn't need to say the rest.

"The safe house stateside?" Eames guesses, his chest knotting tighter and tighter as he comes to realize that Arthur's next flight is going to carry him east rather than west, away rather than towards.

"I guess so," says Arthur, wearily. "Eames."

"No, you," Eames says, and exhales smoke. "You couldn't have known. I'll do what needs doing, here, get Cobol squared away."

"Tell Natasha I'll be back in plenty of time," Arthur says, and then Eames can hear him moving around, zipping his bag. "I've got to grab Cobb, he wanted to call home too." Usually this would be when Arthur clicked off, matter-of-fact as he always is when he's working, but instead there's a palpable hesitation on the other end of the line. "I wish this hadn't been my last fucking job," he says quietly.

"Go on, you're still the best point man in the business," Eames smiles, overcome with a wash of fondness. "Everyone says so."

"Mm," says Arthur, unconvinced. If he were here, Eames would pull him in for a hug, and Arthur would be tense and unhappy right up until he suddenly wasn't anymore, until he slumped into Eames' bulk and exhaled slow and soft. "I'll call you next time I can pin down a secure line," says Arthur, unhugged and audibly worse off for it.

"I got the wipes," Eames offers as a poor token of cheer.

"Mm," says Arthur again, unmoved. "Stay out of trouble, okay? I know how you get when you're bored."

"I'm appalled that you would," Eames begins halfheartedly, trying and failing to get into a teasing mood. "Be safe, darling."

"I'll be fine," Arthur says, and then he's gone, leaving Eames with a sudden sick sense of foreboding coiling in his guts.

 

There's nothing to be done at the moment, and that's the worst part. Eames has to wait until word of Cobol's price on Cobb's head comes round to him naturally, because it's been the careful work of many years keeping his and Arthur's relationship a secret and now would be the worst possible time to slip up, now that seemingly all of subsaharan Africa is on high alert looking for Dominick Cobb and his known associates. Eames tries not to resent it more than he already does, but it's difficult; Kenya has always been his and Arthur's safe little backwater. It's no one's corporate headquarters, Mombasa, it's no one's place of work, no one's key holding. It's the centre of no one's universe — except theirs.

"And mine," says Natasha indignantly when Eames expresses all this to her over a shared plate of _irio_ and bowls of spicy eastern Kenyan soup. "This is my fucking country, you imperialist prat."

"Nairobi's your town, usually," Eames corrects her, unhurt. "Arthur and I get Mombasa to ourselves once you've foaled."

"There's more dreamshare going on here than you can imagine," Natasha says, knocking Eames' fingers aside to get the last _irio_ dumpling. She's always been possessed of a healthy appetite but late pregnancy has tipped it over into the realm of the truly terrifying; Eames shifts his hand out of the way without a murmur of protest. "My friend Yusuf has"—

—"Yes, yes, but that's recreational, innit?" Eames interrupts her, bored. He's met Yusuf once or twice, and the man's a very good chemist but nowhere near the heart of dreamshare, the business of it. "I've no doubt he's cooking up very interesting versions of Somnacin in his bathtub, but I'm talking about people with connections, love. People who know people."

"Snob," she says, arching one eyebrow. She settles back in her chair and eyes Eames' beer bottle with obvious envy, then runs a hand over the alarming slope of her belly. "I'll tell you when I hear anything about Cobol and Arthur," she says, returning to their original point. "He'd be safe enough if they captured Cobb, you know," she adds, pointing out the painfully obvious.

"Never happen," Eames says with a regretful sigh. "Arthur's very principled."

"Pff," says Natasha dismissively.

"That's the father of your child you're disdaining," Eames reminds her, hiding his smile under the lip of his beer bottle.

"No, that's the father of _your_ child," Natasha answers neatly. "You picked him, Eames; I picked _you_ , if you recall."

Eames _does_ recall. It was some six months earlier, working a job in Auckland with Eames forging and Natasha as chemist. Usually the pair of them worked well together, and Eames liked the chance to practice his Swahili with her, but on this job she'd seemed distant, irritable. Finally, the third night, he'd lingered behind after the extractor and point had gone for the day, and she'd ignored him steadfastly until she suddenly looked up from her chemical apparatus and said, "You don't want a baby, do you?"

Eames didn't want a baby, nothing like it, and he'd said as much, startled.

"Too bad," she'd answered then, going back to her Bunsen burner. "I don't know what I'm going to do with one either, our line of work."

Eames made all the appropriate sympathetic noises, agreed with Natasha that having a baby was a terrible idea, and listened politely while she explained that she didn't want to get rid of it but she wasn't about to foist it off on her poor mother either. "We're very fertile, Kikuyu," she'd said despondently. "It was one time, and the condom fucking broke." She'd swirled something in a beaker, frowned, and looked over at Eames again. "Are you _sure_ you don't want a baby?"

"Arthur would have my head," Eames had answered unthinkingly, and that was how Natasha became the first and only person in the business to know about them.

"But that's perfect!" she'd exclaimed when she'd wrung the whole story out of him. "You're already a couple, you need children!"

"You sound like my mother," Eames had told her drily, and begun the painstaking process of first securing her solemn vow of silence about him and Arthur, and then changing the subject entirely, because his head suddenly hurt.

Eames still isn't clear, in retrospect, how he'd gone from idly gossiping with Arthur about Natasha's situation, to meeting with a lawyer and setting up a private adoption some months later, to having a crib and nappies and a whopping great flat of formula cans in the pantry.

"He promises he'll be back in time," Eames tells Natasha now, setting down the empty beer bottle. It sounds like bullshit when he says it aloud like that, but surely it's not; surely Arthur will be home long before the scheduled date of the C-section. It's still eight weeks away or thereabouts. It'll be the work of one week, two at most, to fix things with Cobol once word comes down that they're looking for Cobb.

"I'm sure he will," Natasha says kindly, like she thinks it's bullshit too. Eames shifts in his seat, nervous.

He'll be back in time. He will.

 

"It's a good price that they're offering for you," Eames tells Arthur next time he calls. "I'm putting some thought in, to be honest." He's in the kitchen, trying to work out how to reorganize the cupboards to accommodate a dozen formula bottles and the sterilizer that, it turns out, sterilizes the bottles _in_ the microwave.

"I'm sorry," says Arthur, "it's been a bad twenty-four hours."

Eames freezes in the act of shuffling glasses and plates, pulse kicking up. "Problems making it out of Japan?" he asks, forcing his voice to stay casual, but there's an undertone to Arthur's tone that Eames doesn't like at all.

"No, we made it out fine," Arthur assures him. "We're in Paris."

"In Paris on your way to the US," Eames appends helpfully, hopefully.

"No, in Paris for the duration," Arthur says. "This Japanese guy we tried to extract from, Saito," and dear Arthur, always having a terrible time with non-anglo names, says it 'say-to' just like he says 'nay-roh-bee'. "He tracked us down as we were leaving Tokyo."

"Oh fuck," Eames says, heartfelt.

"No, it's okay," Arthur hastily assures him. "He hired us, actually. I guess he saw something that impressed him in that fucking horror show of a failed extraction."

"You're kidding me." Eames blinks, shakes his head. "The one where you got your kneecap taken off by the rogue projection of your extractor's dead wife? That impressed him?"

Arthur's laugh is helpless and humourless. "I suppose," he allows. "Dom used to be the best, you know. A lot of people still think so."

"Oh, he fed Saito that fucking line about him being 'the most skilled extractor'," Eames groans, getting it. "Right, well, why the fuck are you wrapped up in it, then?"

"That's the thing," says Arthur, "this guy, Saito, he says he has connections that could make Dom's problems disappear." His voice has suddenly gained some energy, and Eames can tell the prospect excites him, the very idea of a final job that lands Cobb back home with his kids where he belongs, a job that gets Arthur off the hook with Cobb once and for all.

"So he's offering the one thing that Cobb wants most, right when he needs it the most," Eames summarises flatly, narrowing his eyes. "In exchange for what, exactly?"

"That's the thing," Arthur says, clearing his throat. "He, uh. Cobb. He promised Saito inception."

 

Eames goes online and orders every article of baby clothing he can find with ears attached: jackets, sleepers, hats, even mittens they'll never need in Kenya. As secret rebellions go, it's appallingly pedestrian, but Eames gets an undeniable thrill of satisfaction every time he discovers something else that will make Arthur scowl. It also keeps Eames from doing something really mad, like racing to the airport and catching the next flight to Charles de Gaulle, abducting Arthur out of Cobb's clutches once and for all.

He's in the middle of confirming the purchase of a child-sized umbrella with a teddy bear face silk-screened onto it (complete with nylon ears attached, of course) when his work mobile buzzes and skids over the surface of the coffee table. Eames snags it, peeks at the screen.

_Cobb's coming to you. Tried to stop him. He wants you on the job as forger. SAY NO but KEEP HIM SAFE._

Eames considers sending a response but can't think of anything to contribute. They avoid contact as much as possible when on the job; a text message means that Arthur is physically in the workplace right now, probably snuck off to the loo just to send the text, and deleted it straightaway afterwards. Replying would just complicate things for Arthur.

"Joy, I'll be gone the next little while," Eames tells her as he throws clothes into a suitcase, suits and shirts and ties and dress socks as well as his more usual sartorial fare. God knows where he'll wind up after Cobb comes for him, and he doesn't want to risk having Cobol's goons tail him back to their house. It'll have to be the flat in the city centre, then, that grimy depressing hovel that Cobb thinks is Eames' roost of choice in Kenya. "This should do you for a few weeks," he says, and digs in his pocket, comes up with a roll of shilling notes. "Leave most of it in the little safe in the hallway if you feel better that way, love," he adds, seeing the consternation on her face. "Take what you need as you need it."

She takes the money, pockets it carefully, and fixes her gaze on the far wall. "Is Mr. Arthur," she begins to ask, and shuts herself down with visible effort. It's almost as painful to avoid answering her, mostly because the impulse to share his worries with another soul who cares for Arthur is overwhelming, but Eames gives her only a little dismissive shake of the head and a forced smirk.

"One last merry little jaunt before we bring the baby home, that's all," he tells her, but Joy remains silent, anxiety creasing her brow. " _Daraja livuke ulifikiapo, mama_ ,"2 Eames says, more quietly. "Don't borrow trouble, hmm?"

Joy casts a pointed look at the stacks of forged poker chips Eames has yet to fit into his suitcase.

" _Assalala!_ "3 Eames says, all mock surprise. "What are those doing there?"

It has the desired effect of making Joy smile, at least, and she leaves the room with a stifled laugh, a lighter step.

 

It's not Eames' fault that Arthur wasn't home to check his spelling, and anyway the casino didn't notice, so Cobb can just shut his bloody pretentious mouth.

 

In the end, Eames neither says no nor goes to particular pains to keep Cobb safe. If Arthur asks, Eames will say that he has great faith in Cobb's cockroach-like ability to survive any number of attempts on his life; in his heart of hearts, of course, Eames wouldn't mind too terribly if Cobol's henchmen did in fact manage to stomp that particular cockroach into a dark smudge in some Mombasa alleyway. Cobb shows up at the rendezvous point, though, true to his pestilent nature.

"You speak some Swahili, right?" Cobb asks, still out of breath from the chase, slouched low against the back seat of the town car. "How the hell do you order coffee?"

 

Eames waits until he's safe in a hotel room in Sydney before he calls Arthur again.

"Cobb says you're in?" Arthur asks, picking up the phone, forgoing any kind of polite greeting. "Jesus christ, Eames."

"I've no desire to be a single parent, Arthur," Eames answers back, "and as far as I can see, this is our best chance of avoiding that. Cobb needs a forger, I'm going to forge, and you're going to do that thing you do where you pretend you can't stand the sight of me."

"Yeah, that's going to be a big challenge, dramatically speaking," Arthur grouses. "Does Natasha know you've fucked off to Australia?"

"I told her we'd be back in time," Eames says instead of answering. "Listen, Arthur, you're right about one thing: Cobb used to be the best. Three years ago, a job like this, he's the only extractor I would have dared trust. Maybe, just maybe, he can still pull this off — but if he's going to manage it, he needs the best team possible, and that means both of us backing him. Who's he got for an architect?"

"She's good," Arthur says, taking his turn at evasion. "I'm working with her, she's going to be fine. Anyway, she's just building the levels, she's not going under for the job."

"I think Yusuf is going to prove valuable," Eames replies, letting it slide for now. "But Arthur, he's not been in the field much, we need to keep an eye on him."

"Too bad we couldn't have Natasha," Arthur sighs. "But no, I'm sure he'll be fine. He seems harmless enough."

"Oh fuck, what time is it here?" Eames asks, glancing between his wristwatch and the bedside alarm clock. Neither seems remotely accurate going by the noise in the corridor outside, the light slanting in the window.

"Sydney?" asks Arthur, who of course can work out an actual answer. "Uh, it's — eight in the morning?"

"Bugger, I'm going to be late my first day at Fischer Morrow," Eames says, tugging at his cuffs, checking his hair in the mirror. "Wait, you did say I was right to wear the square silver cufflinks with the black belt?"

"Yeah, it's fine," Arthur answers, "and besides, you're supposed to be a lawyer, no point in being too original with your fashion choices."

Eames looks down at himself: grey everything. Being original hardly seems like a danger. "Right, I'd better dash. See you in Paris, darling."

 

"You can't be here," says Arthur when he pulls the hotel room door open in Paris a couple of weeks later. "Jesus, Cobb is two doors down."

Eames waggles his eyebrows. "Yes, best to leave me lingering suspiciously in the corridor outside your room then."

Arthur sighs and yanks Eames in with a finger hooked into his belt, lets the door shush closed behind him. He and Cobb always wind up in this sort of sanitized American-style chain hotel, mostly because they're the easiest to hack into later, to remove all trace of their presence. Thick cushy carpet, sleek furniture bolted in place, obscenely large flat-screen television, a dozen mass-manufactured nods to the current trends in home fashion. Eames jams his hands in his pockets and pivots, taking it all in. The view from the window is of the building across the street — another American-style hotel, of course. On the too-small desk sit Arthur's laptop and half a dozen file folders on Robert Fischer, his childhood, his education, his work habits. 

It's Arthur's work world, and it couldn't be more different than their stucco-walled half-century-old bungalow in Mombasa if it tried.

"Brought you something," Eames says, and hands Arthur the shopping bag he’s had stuffed under his arm.

Arthur doesn't open it, just stares at Eames with the small muscles of his jaw flickering. It's almost impossible to guess if he's annoyed, angry, or working hard to hold himself back, to keep himself in character. It's never as easy for Arthur, the way they have to be on the job, and it's been three days since Eames arrived from Sydney — time enough for Arthur to have finally got comfortable playing the part. Eames is about to make it all more difficult again.

"Go on, take a look," Eames says, smiling gently.

Arthur sighs, breaks his glare, and stuffs his hand into the tissue paper, comes out with his hand wrapped around Paris's ugliest snowglobe: the Eiffel tower, Montmartre, and Notre Dame in unlikely proximity to each other and completely out of scale, just visible through sickly swirling skiffs of chunky white plastic shreds.

"It plays Piaf," Eames says delightedly, rocking up onto the balls of his feet. "We could wind it up and use it for the kick."

Arthur looks at Eames, and finally the corner of his mouth is twitching. He drops the globe back in the bag with a thunk and then lets the bag fall to the floor, already reaching for Eames' waist with both hands, tugging at his shirt to pull it free from Eames' trousers. Three days since Eames arrived in Paris, and two weeks in Sydney before that, and over a week even before that since Arthur had left Eames in Mombasa and gone to Pretoria: it's longer than Eames likes to go without Arthur's fingers skimming hungrily over his sides, Arthur's mouth pressing into his own.

But the fall dislodged something inside the workings of the snowglobe, and as they kiss the tinny music pings up at them, slowly, faintly, as if unsure of its welcome. Arthur breaks the kiss and smirks at Eames. "That's not Piaf," he says.

"I didn't think you'd bother to check before you binned it," Eames admits, grinning. "Go on, then, it's still a good song." He slides his arms around Arthur's neck, sways them both, humming.

"Don't sing, Eames," Arthur says, but even as he says it, his forehead tips forward and rests against Eames', his eyes slipping closed. "You have a terrible singing voice."

Eames ignores this blatantly envy-based untruth and goes on singing, ignoring the sad winding-down from the music box now, just shifting his feet, his hips, humming to Arthur, opening up into words once his brain starts to provide them: "Stars shining high above you, something something hm hm say that I love you." 

Arthur groans and protests and tries to make Eames stop, but he pulls Eames in closer anyway, moves to the slow lazy romantic pulse of the song as they shift into something more like an embrace. Eames can feel it when Arthur's cheek dimples faintly against his own, and it's not long from there to outright soft laughter. That's finally what does it, completes the transition from the Arthur who scowls at him and pokes holes in his ideas and sighs impatiently at his every utterance, to the Arthur who burns microwave popcorn every single fucking time, who genuinely thinks that Knight Rider is a brilliant show, whose laptop screen is at this very moment displaying a selection of the finest bibs the internet has to offer rather than anything at all to do with Robert Fischer and his possible interactions with known dreamshare militarization specialists.

  


All the worry and tension of the job blinks away, then, and they're left alone, delightfully alone. This time when Arthur's hands reach around and tug up on the back of Eames' shirt, his motions are careful, deliberate. "I'm pretty sure that song doesn't have any lyrics about ducks flying into a jello spoon," Arthur observes. "What the hell is a jello spoon? Is it made of jello?"

"It's, uh," Eames improvises, kissing the tip of Arthur's nose, the divot of his upper lip, "it's the spoon one uses for — at formal dinners and such — you Yanks know nothing about fine dining and etiquette," and then he finishes his admonition with a kiss to the soft place under the corner of Arthur's jaw, and Arthur's head tips to the side to make it easier.

In all their years together, they've never actually done this on the job. At first it had been about Arthur's sense of propriety, and then it had been about keeping their relationship as secret as possible, and now it's just the way things are, the way they do things. But this is the last job, and it's a fucking dangerous one at that; Eames thinks the universe owes them this much.

"You know, in the song, the guy stays until morning," Arthur says, later, boneless and half-melted into the pillow-top mattress, sheets twisted appealingly around his hips. His hair product has officially lost the battle against Arthur's delightful natural tendency towards curving curling locks. There's a rather alarming love bite just under his collarbone.

Eames zips his fly, turns round and tries to locate his blazer. "Yes, well, in the song the other guy's boss isn't an unbalanced insomniac with a propensity for midnight epiphanies and subsequent strategy sessions." He finds the blazer, tugs it on, and trips over the snowglobe on his way to peer through the peephole in the door. The music box lurches back to life long enough to ping out three or four notes. The corridor looks clear.

"He did introduce us," Arthur points out, as he often does.

"We would have met some other way," Eames responds, as always, and comes back towards the bed to offer one last kiss. "Goodnight, darling. Dream a little dream of — well, something nice anyway, hmm?"

Arthur's lips go still against Eames', but when he pulls away it's to show a slow curving smile. "Give me a year or two to work through the Somnacin half-life," he says, "and maybe, yeah."

 

Another week goes by; Maurice Fischer pops his clogs at last.

 

Paris to Sydney, retracing his footsteps now, and Eames sits in an airport lounge trying to figure out how to make his phone connect with the wireless in the Singapore airport. He's got a new message but he can't for the life of him make it show up on his screen. "Yes, connect to network!" Eames tells his phone, giving it a shake. "Connect to bloody — what? Why not? You horrid little —"

"Gimme that," says Arthur, leaning forward from the seat opposite, swiping Eames' phone. "You know, you're not actually from the 1940s," he says, tapping away with his thumbs while Ariadne divides an amused look between them and Dom goes on brooding, oblivious. "Despite your appearance and manners."

"Cheers," Eames says, flashing a small sarcastic smile at Arthur, holding out his palm so Arthur can return the phone. It's never clear, at this point on a job, how much of the sniping between them is acting and how much is legitimate tension borne of weeks spent not touching, not talking, not sleeping in the same bed. Eames doesn't bother to sort out his feelings, usually — they sort themselves out in their own time — but it's bothering him now. Everything about this job bothers him.

The mysterious message is open on the screen already, and a quick glance over at Arthur confirms that he'd read it before handing the phone back. It's from Natasha.

_Glad you're back soon but don't hurry on my account. Much as I want this over with, the doctor assures me I'm nowhere near delivering. Might, however, split open like an overripe mango if this goes on much longer._

She's attached a photo of herself with her shirt hiked up to show off the stretched-tight bump of her belly, which truly doesn't seem like it could get any larger before bursting along the dark seam running downwards from her navel. Eames moves to stroke a finger over the curve, doing his best to imagine the child inside, and stops when the light reveals the smudge of another finger that's just traced the same line on the screen, a finger noticeably narrower than Eames' own.

 

What Arthur doesn't understand, hasn't ever understood, is that Eames' problem with Cobb isn't personal. Cobb is pretentious, yes, with that air of vague entitled superiority that clings like a miasma to everyone who was in on the ground-floor work with PASIV ten years ago: like he might be a criminal and a liar and a professional mindfuck but his shit doesn't stink, not his. Still, his reputation has been fairly earned, and there was a time that Eames gladly grit his teeth and worked alongside him, because Cobb's jobs netted the biggest payouts, the most interesting work.

But that was before Mal died, and before Cobb slipped into the most dangerous of states: that of a man with almost nothing left to lose. Arthur doesn't know desperation like Cobb's — and if Eames has his way, he never will — but it does put Arthur in harm's way, his stubborn insensitivity to Cobb's volatile nature, Cobb's irrationality. Eames understands people, knows what drives them, can predict decisions made and the emotions behind them, but Cobb is operating far outside the bounds of normalcy, of cause-effect. Eames can't guess Cobb's next move, and that terrifies him to no end.

"It's going to be fine," Arthur says very quietly, drying his hands on some paper towel. They're briefly alone together in the men's toilet of yet another airport lounge, this time waiting for the Sydney to LAX flight to start boarding. "Eames, it's fine."

Eames checks his reflection in the mirror, can't see whatever it is that Arthur reads in his own expression. He looks, to his own eyes, normal, relaxed, calm. "There's something else going on," he says, not bothering to demur. "I've a bad feeling." He looks over at Arthur. "You're doing everything in your power to help him get back to his family. Just — remember you've got one to come back to, too?"

Arthur doesn't smile it away and he doesn't sigh and dismiss Eames' warning either. He just swallows, nods, and balls up the paper in his hands, dropping it in the bin. Whatever he's about to say is cut off by the door swinging open to admit Robert Fischer; Arthur is forced to head out into the lounge without a glance back at Eames.

Eames finishes washing his own hands, is about to head back into the lounge too when his phone buzzes in his inside blazer pocket. He slips it out, scrolls to the new text message, half-expecting to see some reassurance from Arthur even though Arthur doesn't touch his phone on the job, generally. But it's not Arthur texting.

_Doctor says I'm 25% effaced and I've lost my mucous plug (disgusting as it sounds, yes) so we've moved the surgery date up to this Friday. Hurry back after all._

Eames stares at the message so long that Fischer's done pissing and is washing his hands too by the time he comes back to himself. No point forwarding it to Arthur, now. The only way out is through.

 

The only way out is through. The only way through is down. The only way down is —

Fischer's pale and still but Eames wrests his jacket and jumper up anyway, starts placing the paddles, moving automatically, running on adrenaline. Up above Arthur will have been evading Fischer's security for endless minutes, and even with Arthur's deadly precision and agility, there's every chance that one of them's gotten lucky by now, that Arthur's been knocked down to limbo, that — but now and then there's a light prolonged pressure on Eames' shoulder, his upper arm, and he knows it's Arthur, that Arthur's still up there, still okay.

Eames takes a moment to react when Cobb stops him, his hand still curled up against the warmth of Fischer's dead belly. "So that's it then, we failed," he half-asks, and all the fight goes out of him at once, the energy he's been using to race towards the finish line. Eames blows out a breath, sniffs hard to clear his nose that's running from the cold and exertion, and says, more to remind himself than to taunt Cobb, "Well, it's not me that doesn't get back to my family, is it?"

But Ariadne, the tiny brainbox, has just one more clever plan in her, and it miraculously turns out to be enough to carry all of them back up, carry them through, carry them out.

Cobb gets his happily ever after, but it's Arthur's curling sweet smile on the plane afterwards that makes it all worth it, every fucking horrible minute.

 

Because they can, and because it's probably the last time in a long time, Eames and Arthur celebrate the success of their final job by getting methodically and thoroughly lashed on several bottles of wine, followed by several minutes of enthusiastic if somewhat graceless sex on the floor of their hotel room. Arthur is delightfully unable to shed his smile; if anything, it widens as the evening progresses. By the time they stagger over to the balcony and flop into the folding chairs set there, Arthur is loopy with grinning, unapologetic, sprawled with legs indecently spread under his hotel bathrobe.

"That was a hell of a fucking rush," Arthur says, tilting his head back, treating the stars to his dimples. "And now we get to go home."

"About that," says Eames, giving up on knotting the belt of his own robe. No one can see his balls way up here, anyway. Probably. "I spoke to Natasha while you were in the shower, darling."

Arthur startles badly enough that he repeats Eames' demonstration of a kick, limbs outstretched as the front legs of his chair collide with the floor of the balcony. "Is the baby here?" he asks, wide-eyed, panicked, not a little adorable.

"Christ, no," Eames says, stifling a quiet drunken belch, "but we have a little problem getting you back. Natasha says Cobol's still on the lookout for you. They'll certainly have someone at the airports in Mombasa and Nairobi, I'm afraid."

"Oh, fuck," Arthur says feelingly, sagging back into his chair, scrubbing a hand over his head until his hair is going every direction at once. "But — we have to be back by Friday. Can — maybe Saito can —"

"I've no doubt that he'll sort it out if you ask him," Eames assures him, "but I don't fancy you setting foot in Kenya until I've made sure of things myself." He gives Arthur as steady a look as he can manage, drunk as he is. "I'm so sorry, love."

Arthur shakes his head, and the smile is long gone now. "I can't miss it, Eames. I can't."

"No, of course not," Eames hastens to agree. "Natasha had her doctor reschedule for Monday. She's not due for two more weeks, they feel certain she'll last a little longer, there's abso—absolutely no rush, nothing to," and Eames has lost his train of thought a little because Arthur's smiling again, hiding it, ducking his head with pleasure. "You'll be there. I'll need a few days to make sure of it, that's all."

Arthur tips his chair back again, satisfied, and casts a sidelong glance at Eames. With his hair loose and his dimples out, he looks ten years younger. Eames beams back at him, enjoying the view. "What's that thing they say?" Arthur asks, rocking back and forth slightly. "That thing they say in Kenya?"

" _Ukimwiga tembo kunya utapasuka mkundu_?" Eames suggests, lifting his eyebrows, pulling a helpful face. "Shit like an elephant and rip your arsehole?"

It's a testament to how drunk Arthur is that he laughs helplessly instead of rolling his eyes at Eames. "No," he protests, between fits of giggles, "the thing about, about parents and babies."

"Mm," Eames says, pretending to get it now. " _Mkono mmoja haulei mwana._ It takes two hands to raise a child." And it's nothing he'd dare do if he were sober himself, but it's easy now to reach across and curl his fingers around Arthur's pinkie, to tug gently at it and imagine for a moment that in short days, their child will be doing the same.

 

Eames leaves early the next morning, badly hung over and envious of Arthur still clinging to the bed. It's some small blessing to be able to prey on Saito's gratitude a little longer, to fly first class on his airline, but LAX to Mombasa is still a clusterfuck of an itinerary: more than thirty hours from gate to gate to gate to gate, with a stopover in DC and another in Ethiopia. Eames' head doesn't hurt any more by the time he touches down in Kenya, but he's spent more time in the air than on the ground the past week and his whole body is aching in protest.

It's around noon in Mombasa, far too early in LA to call Arthur. Eames sends him a text to let him know he's arrived home safely and staggers out into the heat and sunlight to find a taxi. He's barely gotten settled in the back seat, hasn't even had time to properly convince the driver through careful application of his Swahili that he's not a fucking tourist, when his mobile rings.

"Arthur?" Eames says, fumbling around for a seatbelt before remembering he's in Kenya and seatbelts are not _de rigeur_ here.

"So you're back, then?" Natasha asks. "About time."

"Mm, back," Eames says, trying to smile, "freshly off the plane. How are you? Bursting like a mango yet?"

"Not yet," Natasha says, "but I wish to god I were. I think I had some bad chicken, ai ai ai. I've been sick all day."

"Not in labour, I hope?" Eames asks cheerily, amused. "Hang on a moment, sweetheart," he says to her, and puts his palm over the phone, rattles off his opening bid on fare to the driver in his best slangy Swahili. There's the usual bit of back and forth and they settle on a slightly higher number than Eames would usually pay, but he's too exhausted to barter any longer. "Sorry, I was just," he tells Natasha, going back to the call, "you did say it was bad chicken, right?"

"I got dodgy stew off a street vendor mama," she groans. "I can't wait until my appetite stops overrunning my brain."

"What did the doctor say, salmonella?" Eames asks, stifling a yawn, scrubbing at his eyes.

"I haven't been," she says.

Eames blinks with surprise, clucks his tongue in disapproval. "No, that won't do. I'll come round for you, we'll take you to the hospital and get you sorted out."

"Nonsense," she says, "I'm fine, it's a bad stomach, that's all."

"If you're certain," Eames says, frowning.

"I'll take a tuk-tuk4 to the clinic if it doesn't get better in a few hours," she says. "I promise."

"Not a tuk-tuk," Eames replies sharply. "Call me, I'll come round with Arthur's car." He hesitates. "But only if you're sure you're not in labour. Arthur doesn't even let me eat in his car, he'd murder me if your waters broke on the upholstery."

"I'm fine," she says. "Go home and sleep, you worrywart."

Eames hangs up and slumps gratefully down into the seat for a moment, glad to be freed of any need to act immediately. The relief only lasts as long as it takes to picture Arthur's reaction to the same phone call. With a sigh he leans forward and taps the driver on the shoulder. " _Samahani, bwana_. Change of plans."

He's not sure what uneasy impulse makes him ask the cabbie to wait at the curb when they get to Natasha's flat, but he keeps his pace moderate and calm as he goes up the walk and has the security guard ring up to let her know he's coming in.

"Good lord, you're enormous," Eames says when Natasha opens the door. She's wearing a capacious flower print dress that does nothing to mask her alarmingly huge belly. Her braids are snugged back from her face, and she doesn't look well at all, a sheen of perspiration obvious even though her flat is air conditioned and cool. "Go on, then, we're taking you to be looked at," he says, making up his mind on the spot.

"I'm fine," she bites out. "Go home. I'll see you Monday at the hospital like we planned."

"Hmm, I think not," Eames says, smiling tightly. "Look, at the worst they'll make fun of me for bringing you in for nothing and you can hold it over me for all eternity, how I got so broody and overprotective."

Natasha sizes him up, seems to see he won't be moved, and turns aside to pluck her handbag from where it's hanging on the knob of the closet door. "I'm telling you, it was the dodgy chicken," she says, coming along anyway.

"I'm sure it was," Eames says, and resists the urge to guide her down the walkway to the lift. He feels like he's escorting an overblown helium balloon.

"You're not so gorgeous yourself at the moment," she observes coolly as the lift moves downwards. "You smell like a warthog." Her nostrils flare warningly and then she's breathing slowly and deliberately through her nose as though working through a wave of nausea.

"Thank you," Eames smiles brightly, amused.

The cabbie doesn't look very pleased at the sight of his new passenger so Eames hastily passes him another few banknotes and grins amiably as he names the nearest hospital.

"Should we ring your doctor?" Eames asks while Natasha shifts and shifts in the seat, uncomfortable.

"No, fuck off," she snaps, and presses her lips together, moans quietly. Eames cracks the window and pulls his passport out of his jacket pocket, fans her with it for lack of anything better to do.

"You're sure you're not in labour?" he asks, one last time.

"I'm barely thirty-eight weeks," she says. "I'm having the baby by elective caesarian on Monday. _Like we planned, Eames._ "

"Righto," Eames agrees with an eager nod, wanting very badly for her to be right on this point. 

The cabbie accelerates noticeably, perhaps less easily convinced, and it's a good job he does because the nearer they get to the hospital the less Natasha is behaving like a woman with a digestive upset, her soft moans of distress picking up in both volume and frequency. Eames is sweating too, now, and he's getting waves of sympathy nausea with every fresh burst of sound from Natasha. Arthur's not here. This can't be happening.

They're still three blocks away, stopped at a light, when Natasha heaves the door open a little and is violently sick in the open gutter. Disgusting as it is, the sight makes Eames go limp with relief; she really is just horribly ill off dodgy chicken, then, and not in fact — not the other thing. He leans across her and helps her pull the door closed again while the driver zooms forward on the green light; but it's then, with one arm pressed uncomfortably over Natasha's middle, that he feels it, the abrupt hard taut clench of muscle as her belly pulls tight, squeezes.

"Monday," says Natasha, fisting a hand in the front of Eames' shirt. "Monday, not today."

"I'm sure you're right," Eames says as calmly as he can manage. His heart is racing worse than it was skiing down the snowy slopes with an avalanche chasing him; he fights the impulse to go for his totem. This is, regrettably, all too real.

It takes ages to cross the last short distance to the casualty entrance of the hospital, but at last they arrive and Eames launches from the taxi like a cat racing out of a paper bag. "We need labour and delivery," he bellows at the first person he spots wearing hospital scrubs, a brisk-looking middle aged woman coming forward to greet them.

"Yes, yes, baba," she says, fetching a wheelchair. "Let's get her into it, hmm?"

Eames opens Natasha's door and takes her by the hand, but she's about as easy to shift as a boulder and she seems almost unaware that Eames is even trying, which is vaguely insulting given the amount of time he's spent in the gym bench-pressing hundreds of pounds. "Come on, love," he coaxes her, giving up on brute force. "Come on, up you get."

Natasha's only response is to yank her hand away and grunt terrifyingly.

"Let's go, sister," says the nurse, shoving her way between Eames and the cab, and Natasha staggers to her feet now, barely managing the few steps she needs to take in order to reach the chair. Eames leaps back out of the way because — Natasha is leaking, suddenly, and it's disgusting.

"Is she meant to be doing that?" Eames demands, appalled.

The nurse doesn't even bother looking, like people show up all the time with things dripping out of them, and right, probably they do, but it seems like the sort of thing one should always notice at least. It's only polite. "Hey, sister, we gonna take you inside, hmm?" she says, and gets round to the pushing side of the chair, and Eames trails helplessly after feeling like he might start leaking fluids any moment too: be sick everywhere, or piss himself in terror, maybe.

"She's meant to have an elective caesarian," Eames contributes as they wheel down the corridor and Natasha goes on making horrible noises and dripping. "She ought to go straight up to the operating theatre."

"No, this one isn't having a caesarian," the nurse says cheerfully. "This one is having a baby right now, baba."

"No," Natasha contributes, abruptly lucid. "No, I'm meant to have the baby on Monday. Eames, tell her."

"Monday," Eames agrees vehemently, stupidly. "Or now, if you must. But, in surgery. It's the plan, you see."

"No," says the nurse, beaming at him, amused. "Right now, baba, like I said." And she makes a sudden turn and they're in a miserably dingy curtained area. "Up you get," she says to Natasha.

"Are you mad, she can't stand up, she's in agony!" Eames yells, appalled, but the nurse has magic powers of persuasion or something like, because Natasha is stumbling back up to her feet even as she cries out with heart rending certainty, " _Mama! Ninakufa!_ "5

"Nonsense," says the nurse, "you are doing wonderfully, sister. Come on, now, let mama look." She chivvies Natasha over to lie down on the hospital bed and gets her dress rucked up, tugs her knickers off before Eames can gather the sense to avert his eyes. The nurse pulls on a latex glove and now Eames clues in enough to stare intently up at the ceiling tiles. "Ah, baba, I feel a head, what did I tell you?" She straightens up and waves Eames over, and Natasha doesn't even seem to care that she's naked from the waist down and he's seeing it. "I'll go fetch the midwife, we'll be having a baby any minute now."

And just like that, they're alone. Natasha seems to be between labour pains, however briefly, and she turns her head on the pillow, seizes Eames' hand. "Eames, when the baby comes, you have to hold it."

"Of course," Eames assures her, even though his mind's stuck on the word _baby_ , it's echoing round his head madly now. This isn't happening. Arthur's not here.

"Don't let them give it to me," she says urgently. "Eames, I don't want to hold it. It's your baby."

"Right," Eames says, nodding along. Arthur's not here. This isn't happening.

The nurse comes back with the midwife and they're moving the bed, getting it set up with stirrups and reclined at an angle, and there's a tray of horrible looking instruments, and then there's a clear plastic isolette already lined with homely blue sterile drapes, and Eames stares at it and thinks, _That's where they'll put the baby_.

Arthur's not here.

Arthur.

Eames reaches into his jacket pocket, finds his mobile, and dials without thinking.

 

_Where the bloody hell — fuck, it's the middle of the night yet there, isn't it? Jesus fucking christ, Arthur, it's happening. They've got her in stirrups and she's — well, you can hear for yourself, can't you? God, it's awful. This is awful. No, no, it's all right, I don't need to come round that side, I can see from here — fuck, I — oh, bloody hell, they're making me look. Agh, I couldn't be gayer right now, that's revolting. Agh! Arthur, you horrible — you should be here, this is terrible, why aren't you here? No, no, I'm watching, I — Natasha, I'm sure this is very miraculous and gorgeous but it really does look like something out of a horrible slasher film. There's — things are bulging. Oh, god, this is the foulest thing I've ever — dreaming or waking. This is nothing like the movies, Arthur! Fuck, fuck, jesus fucking — oh, god, oh, I'm going to be sick, I'm going to —_

_I'm —_

_Arthur,_ darling _. She's here. My god, she's here._

 

Eames realizes, some hours later, that he'd left his suitcase in the back of the cab.

It doesn't matter. He can buy new clothes.  


* * *

  
In Addis Ababa, Arthur buys new clothes, glasses, ugly Teva sandals, a cheap basic prepaid mobile, a bulky impractical hiking backpack with an aluminum frame, and a battered old jeep. He goes into the hair salon in a western business hotel and has them shear off most of his hair, leaving him with a bare half-inch or so of dark fuzz. He practices his Australian accent — the only accent he's ever convincingly managed, and that only after extensive coaching from Eames — chatting with the barber.

The safe drop box is on the edges of town, a scratched up padlocked locker in an abandoned high school. Arthur grabs the bag out of it and drives for an hour before he pulls over to the side of the barely-paved highway and digs through, finds the clean Australian passport whose alias has no history of association with Dom Cobb or dreamshare in general. It's the work of a few minutes to find a forged Ethiopian tourist visa sticker that has a reasonably recent date, but Eames' work is thorough, and eventually Arthur locates one, slaps it into the passport just a little crooked next to the older stamps that show he's travelled around the world only as much as one might expect from an adventurous Australian university student. He hides the rest of the IDs and visa stickers down the ripped lining inside his backpack, stuffs the backpack into the footwell of the passenger seat, and pulls back onto the highway.

Arthur drives, wishing he could text Eames.

But Eames knows what he needs to know, for now. Arthur had told him as much as he could as quickly as he could after landing in Addis Ababa and realizing he'd picked up a tail in the airport. Arthur had ducked into a bathroom stall long enough to text Eames their prearranged code meaning 'trouble, will contact again when safe', flushed the phone, and then had a quick mostly-silent struggle with the guy who'd tailed him into the toilets, left him unconscious with one arm dangling in the bowl of the commode, beat a hasty path to the exit of the airport. Eames knows no news is good news, and he knows too that Saito's attempts to call off Cobol haven't been completely successful. He'll be working the problem from his end.

In the meantime Arthur's left to make his own way out of Ethiopia and into Kenya, and that means a lot of driving on very poor African roads, at least until he can think of a better way to move. Arthur knows Mombasa but he hasn't got Eames' polyglot son-of-a-diplomat ease with Africa in general, which is why he's chosen to play tourist — but this comes with its own set of complications, walking the line between wide-eyed innocence and grim realistic badassery, between travelling at a leisurely sightseeing pace and making real progress as he moves south towards the border. Arthur knows enough to know that he shouldn't risk the wildlife-frequented highways by night, though, so eventually he drives a ways off the road onto someone's private driveway, parks, and sleeps uneasily through the darkness with his hunting knife within arm's reach.

He picks up a hitchhiker first thing in the morning, which is a calculated risk. It's bad to have someone who can identify him, of course, but it's equally good to have someone who can identify him as a friendly Australian man who was generous enough to give someone a ride. Arthur chooses carefully, picks up a middle-aged woman who's travelling alone. He asks lots of silly tourist questions about where she lives, how she lives, where she works, how big is her family, and she answers with the polite patience of one accustomed to being interrogated by ignorant people.

"Have you got kids, sir?" asks the woman at one point, and it's not in Arthur's goofy-uni-student character, but he finds himself badly wanting to say, _yeah, yeah, I do, a little girl_ ; there follows a long helpless silence while Arthur does battle with his rising sense of worry and panic.

"No, no kids," Arthur says at last, and starts asking her about what kind of food they eat in her village. Eventually they get to the turn-off towards her community and he drops her there with lots of smiling and waving and dismissal of her thanks.

The second day, Arthur drives alone, which is quieter; but when he finally stops for the night, a little shy of the border, his fingernails on his left hand are bitten to the quick, bleeding. Enough is enough. Arthur stays in a small resort hotel inside the wilderness reserve nearby, and there he buys another prepaid mobile. He uses the first to send a message.

_I'm on my way._

The answer is almost immediate: _how long?_

Arthur grins at his screen stupidly, because he can almost hear Eames' voice, the impatience in it. _Four days at the outside,_ he replies, and now he's definitely going to have to destroy this SIM card before he goes to sleep, but it's worth it. _Should I keep up all precautions?_

 _Should, y._ Eames replies. _Check in b4 the last leg 2 b sure all clear._

 _Will do,_ Arthur writes back, then, after a moment's hesitation, sends one last message: _How is she?_

 _Perfect_ , comes Eames' answer. _Shes perfect._

Arthur pulls the SIM card, breaks it in two, flushes one half and stows the other in the back pocket of his godawful khaki cargo shorts, to be flung out the window onto the highway tomorrow morning.

 

The border crossing is crowded, a little smelly, chaotic. Arthur slips an American twenty to one of the roaming security guards and hops to the front of the line. The border agent barely looks at Arthur's fake passport before taking Arthur's payment in shillings and slapping a visa sticker down next to the forged Ethiopian one. He's waving at the next person in line before Arthur's even picked his passport up again.

He's in Kenya; but Mombasa is over 1000 kilometres away, which is three days on bad Kenyan highways.

 

Arthur drives nine hours before his natural caution is utterly wrecked by the appearance of a sign pointing to an airstrip. He turns off the highway and checks his cash reserves; it's enough, he thinks, especially if he offers the jeep in trade.

 

There are lots of inconveniences to living in this part of the world — a lack of 3G coverage and a surfeit of terrible roads among them — but Eames has long since taught Arthur to appreciate the ease with which bribes are offered and accepted. Silence is cheap in Africa, even if fuel isn't.

Arthur leans his forehead against the noisy vibrating window of the small Cessna and watches Kenya roll by lazily, the small dot of their craft's shadow gliding over hills and plains, over the yet smaller dots of a migrating herd of springbok. It gets hot in the cabin and the pilot cracks a window, offers Arthur a can of soda from the cooler between the seats. Arthur takes it, pops the tab, and forgets to drink it before it grows warm and sweaty against his palm.

They stop to refuel at a tiny airstrip called Makindu on the western edge of the immense Tsavo National Park, and Arthur heads for the toilets hoping he looks like a man in desperate need of a piss rather than one who wants five minutes alone with his prepaid mobile.

_I'll be in tonight. Took a shortcut. All clear or should I head for the safe house?_

Eames doesn't answer, and he doesn't answer. Arthur pees, laments the lack of running water or soap, and waits; now he seems more like a man suffering from traveller's diarrhea, he supposes. He glances at himself in the mirror, still vaguely thrown by his shorn head and glasses. The illusion of youth has been disrupted a bit by three days' worth of beard stubble and the sunken look around the eyes that Arthur gets when he hasn't been sleeping well. He looks less like an enthusiastic university student on walkabout and more like his real self: a little dangerous to know.

There's a small lounge area inside one of the airstrip's outbuildings. Arthur collapses into a hard plastic chair and scrubs a hand over his face. He doesn't check his phone again; he'd have heard it if a message arrived.

Before Arthur had left the States, Eames had managed to send one blurry smartphone photo, but it was on Arthur's travel laptop and he'd had to leave that behind in a hotel safe in Addis Ababa. He couldn't afford to have anything on him that led Cobol back to Eames, in case they managed to catch up with him. Arthur drinks bottled water and jiggles his knee and does his best to recreate the photo in his mind's eye: the shape of her little face, the curve of her belly, the wrinkles gathered around the crease of her knee, her ankle, her froggy small toes.

His phone bleeps.

_Come by night. the later the better. Dont worry its not like we will be sleeping_

Arthur pops the SIM card, snaps it, drops half in the wastepaper basket in the corner. He doesn't have a phone now, but of course there are other ways Eames can reach him if he needs to. There are always ways, between the two of them.

"Sir?" says the pilot, poking his head in the lounge — and _sir_ , that's confirmation that Arthur's definitely not fooling anyone into thinking he's just a kid now. "We're all fuelled up if you're ready."

"Yeah, of course," Arthur says, keeping up the accent anyway. He pockets his phone, stands up, follows the pilot back to the waiting plane. It'll be nearly dark by the time they land, at least.

 

It's not Arthur's first annoyingly circuitous homecoming by any stretch of the imagination — in the past, he's come into Mombasa by cargo ship, by overcrowded tuk-tuk, and even once sitting miserably on the flatbed of a poultry truck — but it's his first homecoming where the stakes have been so high. Arthur thinks it's probably also the first time in years that he's felt envious of Dom; all he'd had to do was get in a car and drive back to his kids after the Fischer job.

"Here, sir?" says the taxi driver doubtfully when Arthur makes him pull over. "It's not safe, this time of night, sir."

"I'll be fine," Arthur says grimly, and hauls his backpack after him as he gets out onto the street. There's no one around, which is certainly a dangerous state of affairs for a tourist in this part of Mombasa at nearly three in the morning. It's a mile or so through abandoned alleyways and narrow streets to get home from here, but the point is twofold: the cabbie won't be able to say where Arthur was headed, and no one is around to notice his passage through the unlit area he'll be traversing.

With weary feet, aching shoulders, and gritty eyes, Arthur takes off at a brisk clip and keeps it up until the sound of the taxi has faded into the night. He then drops into a more reasonable distance-covering pace. He has one hand wrapped around the hilt of his knife, tucked into his waistband just in case, but he's almost certain Cobol still hasn't figured out where he was headed from Addis Ababa. As far as they know, Arthur has no contacts in Kenya. As far as they know, Arthur's been scared away by their goon in Ethiopia. 

It's safe, probably.

The streets widen as Arthur leaves the poorer neighbourhoods behind and comes into their own part of town. Here he has to be more cautious, because there is a night guard hired by the residents of almost every block, and while they're not exactly on the lookout for lost white tourists, they're certainly going to remember seeing one. Arthur keeps to the shadows, has to wait a few times for a back to be turned before he can cross the street and cut away into the darkness.

Finally it's their street, their block, and Arthur washes up against the gate of their driveway having passed the point of feeling the protests his body has mounted against him, weirdly detached and spacey. He would almost suspect he's dreaming, except it's been a few years since he dreamt at all outside of work, and his totem is heavy and cool and right whenever he palms it inside his trouser pocket. 

He checks the last point of pre-arranged warning, but there's nothing chalked against the cement fence on either side of the gate. They're safe, at least as far as Eames can tell.

Key goes in the lock which squeaks and squeals, their most low-tech alarm system, and Arthur doesn't trouble to be quiet as he lets the gate clank shut again behind him, because the porch light is shining and just beyond that door is Eames.

Eames, and the baby.

 

"Christ, you look a mess," says Eames, when Arthur finally finds him in their laundry room, at the back of the house.

"Pot, kettle," Arthur answers, because Eames is much more in need of a shave than Arthur, and of a shower too by the smell of him. Eames is wearing a too-small t-shirt with wet patches on one shoulder and sweat pants that Arthur is sure he's banned from existing, and over all that he's got some brightly-coloured sheet tied around him like a mini-toga. More worryingly, there's a sort of scratchy desperation in Eames' eyes, a lack of colour in his usually pink mouth. It's got to be bad if Eames looks like that because Eames is the one who can do without rest for days and still be annoyingly handsome and fresh-faced. 

"Doing laundry at this hour?" Arthur asks. Eames' hips are slung back onto the washing machine, almost riding it like a housewife out of a racy seventies movie.

"I've done laundry every hour day and night since we came home from the hospital," says Eames. He pulls at the fabric looped at an angle between his shoulder and waist and abruptly Arthur realizes that it's a wrap, and it's not empty. "She likes the vibration," Eames says, a little more softly, looking down into the sling. "Besides, she wees constantly, so there's always a load of nappies on the go."

Arthur can't speak, suddenly. He's frozen where he stands.

"If you go for your totem I'll have to punch you in the face," Eames says in a very sweet tone of voice, not breaking his gaze with the baby in the sling. He looks up and casts an amused look at Arthur, obviously not missing his state of shock. "It took me like that, too," he admits, more kindly, "only she was less appealing at the time, all covered in slime and braying like a goat." He curls two fingers, beckoning. "Come here, then. Have a look."

Arthur unsticks his feet from the floor and takes three steps closer, reaches down and tugs at the front of the sling so he can look inside. She's smaller than she'd looked in the photo, and her face is different when it's relaxed in sleep, but Arthur is immediately relieved to find that he recognizes her, he _knows_ her.

"Isn't she," Eames says, whispering now, head crowded up against Arthur's to look too, "isn't she the most —"

"Yeah," Arthur agrees, stunned. "Holy shit."

"Do you want to hold her?" Eames asks. "It'll wake her but she doesn't sleep for long anyway."

"No," says Arthur automatically, "no, she looks all cozy and — no."

"Go on," says Eames, smiling, and makes as though to reach inside the wrap.

"No!" Arthur repeats, alarmed, and gets Eames by the back of the neck, because — kissing Eames, that's safer, and it feels like being home. Eames doesn't take more than a fraction of a second to respond, and then they're kissing slow and easy and sweet like they haven't in weeks, and the baby is a warm slight weight hanging between them, bumping up against Arthur's chest and belly. Eames' fingers go into Arthur's hair, scrub at it a little hatefully because Eames never likes Arthur with short hair, and then they move over and knock off his fake glasses, fling them aside.

"Are you wearing a fucking Billabong shirt?" Eames asks against Arthur's mouth when he finally pulls back a little.

Arthur smirks, moves back in for one last peck. "Says the guy in the hideous sweat pants." 

The baby stirs suddenly, a soft-strong wriggle of movement between them. Arthur pulls away, startled, because — well, he _knew_ she was real, but it's — and now she's making little soft noises, and Eames is nudging Arthur a little further back so he can sway back and forth gently. "No, no, no, sweetheart," says Eames, and leans back against the washer. "Hush, hush, there's a love." He looks up at Arthur with a rueful smile. "Do you want to have a go holding her? She's awake now, anyway."

  


Arthur knows it's stupid — he's going to have to hold her at some point — but it's not like what he pictured, and he can't seem to get past it. He backs away half a step further and starts to shake his head again. He should be feeling something, he thinks, something other than worried and disbelieving and weirdly jealous. Jealous of Eames, who's jouncing the baby gently and looking at her with such a soft look on his face, moving with such confidence and ease, like he's been doing this his whole life and not just the past five days. Eames was supposed to be the one who didn't know what to do, and here he's figured everything out in Arthur's absence. Arthur will never catch up, now.

"Let's go somewhere you can sit properly," says Eames, not remarking on Arthur's continued recalcitrance. "It's easier to hand her over like that."

Arthur follows Eames, not sure what else to do. They wind up in the sitting room, and Eames waves Arthur over to the sofa. Arthur sits, tense and dizzy and sure he's going to do this wrong, somehow. Eames slips the knot of the wrap from his shoulder and that seems to make it easier for him to take the baby out, cradling her body — small, so small — balanced along his forearm, her little head palmed in his hand like a grapefruit. She squirms and waves her fists, making little squeaking sounds, pulling unhappy faces.

"Arms out, that's it," Eames says, and bends down, sliding her little sleeper-clad body into the cradle of Arthur's bent arm. She's light, and she's kicking her legs feebly. "Her colour's coming in," Eames says, flopping down on the sofa next to Arthur, flinging his arm around Arthur's shoulders and leaning close to peer at her. "Joy says she'll keep getting darker for a few months. She's got lovely skin, look at it." He reaches out a finger and strokes one round cheek, and the baby grunts and chases after it, latches onto it. "Oh, I know, I know, piglet," says Eames, laughing.

"That — it's called rooting," says Arthur, dredging it up from his memory of the baby books he'd read what felt like years ago, before Cobol and before Fischer-Morrow. "It's a reflex." The baby's lips are pursed around Eames' fingertip and she's sucking noisily, so far unbothered that it's not doing anything to fill her belly. He frowns. "Are your hands clean?"

"There you are," Eames says fondly, slumping into Arthur's side, yawning. "I know you're relaxing when you start questioning my every move."

"Well, you don't smell clean," says Arthur pointedly, smiling in spite of himself.

"Hard to shower when your services are constantly being demanded," Eames says, unbothered. "Let me fix her up a bottle and then I'll shower while you feed her, hmm?"

"What, and leave me alone with her?" Arthur asks, alarmed. "I'm fucking exhausted, what if I fall asleep and crush her or something?"

Eames stands up with a tired grunt, rubbing his hand over Arthur's head as he goes. "Of course you won't do any such thing," he says. "You're her dad."

"Oh my god, I'm her dad," Arthur says stupidly. She's _his_ baby, his and Eames'. They have papers, actual legal papers attesting to this fact, papers with their real names. Arthur has a baby.

It's not until Eames comes back with a warm bottle of formula and a bib that Arthur even realizes he'd left the room.

Eames goes off again to shower while Arthur plugs the bottle into the baby's mouth. He's pretty sure he's holding it wrong or something because there's formula dribbling down either side of her chin, but she watches him intently with wide dark eyes and doesn't fuss, so it's obviously good enough. She doesn't know any better, he supposes — poor kid.

"Hi," Arthur says, feeling a little silly breaking the silence in the room, like he's talking to a cat or a dog. "I'm sorry I missed everything so far."

She sucks and blinks at him, dribbling.

"I won't miss anything else," Arthur promises a little rashly.

With Eames safely occupied in showering and the baby busy with her bottle, Arthur feels safe to have a closer look at her. He tilts her up a little, peers around at the little wings of her ears, the tiny nascent dark curls that are thicker around the nape of her neck, the soft folds under her chin. Her fingers are long and tapered and the fingernails are pearlescent ovals, miniature and amazing. When Arthur uncurls one fist to look at her palm, to compare the softer pink there against the pale cocoa on the side of her hand, she wraps her fingers back around his pinkie and squeezes with surprising strength. 

  


He cradles the baby in his arm, his palm cupping her small diapered bottom, his elbow curved gently under the stem of her neck, and he thinks that she might be lovely and sweet and small, but really _wobbly_ is the adjective that first comes to his mind. She seems incredibly loosely knitted together, little rubbery joints and dimpled skin and one ear slightly folded down on itself like she's a piece of clothing carelessly stowed when fresh from the dryer. Arthur holds her wriggling wobbly body and his heart is in his throat. 

Eames was right, after all, about the best way to describe her: she's perfect.

Arthur pulls the bottle free when she stops sucking, uses the bib to try and mop up the mess of her chin and neck. She frowns up at him as though trying to figure out who the hell he is, and he laughs without meaning to.

"That means bombs away," Eames says, coming back into the room smelling markedly more appealing, wearing only a towel.

"What means bombs away?" Arthur asks, a little distracted suddenly by the shine of Eames' wet shoulders, but then the baby grunts and emits a series of alarmingly loud popping noises that vibrate against Arthur's wrist. "Holy fuck," says Arthur, blinking.

"Well done, my little froggie," says Eames proudly, and leans down to brush a kiss to the top of the baby's head. "It's time for Daddy's first nappy change." He reaches out, scoops her up with deft confident motions even as Arthur's still scrambling to support her neck. "Come on, I'll show you all the ways I did it wrong the first dozen times."

Arthur doesn't give himself time to think about how his arms feel empty, how his skin feels cool where the baby was nestled against him. He heaves himself up off the couch and follows Eames, focusing instead on the welcome sight of Eames' shower-damp shoulders, the lovely contrast of the white towel at his tanned waist. It takes him a moment, then, to register the state of the nursery once they've arrived at it. Last he saw it, the room was in a perfect state of anticipation, everything in its place, organized within an inch of its life. Now — "What the hell happened?" he asks, horrified, blinking around the room. 

"I didn't know where you put anything," Eames says breezily, stepping over what looks like the contents of every drawer in the room, piled haphazardly around the floor. "We'll put it to rights later."

"You can't just leave things like this, jesus," Arthur says, and starts in on the messy piles of clothing, tossing the bottommost items into the hamper for rewashing. "Why do you have the size six months stuff out, anyway?" He freezes, looking at the hat in his hand. "Does this have ears?"

"You'd fucked off to Tokyo," Eames says, laying the baby down on the changing table. "I had aggression to dispel."

Arthur looks over at Eames, prepared to glare, and is fully derailed again by the fact that Eames has lost his towel in the process of crossing the room. It's been a while since Arthur had the opportunity to admire Eames' bare ass.

"Come here, I want to show you how the soaker pads go in," Eames says, oblivious.

"You emptied drawers you didn't even need to open," Arthur says, injecting a little extra exasperation into his voice in an effort to cover his real feelings. "What the hell were you looking for?"

"A dummy," says Eames, and pops the diaper open. "Wow, this is a stunner. Come see this, Arthur." He looks over his shoulder impatiently and that's it — Arthur's busted. Eames' expression flicks from neutral to filthy in the blink of an eye.

"The pacifiers are in a basket in the kitchen," Arthur says stupidly. "Next to the bottle nipples."

"Nipples, hmm?" says Eames, sounding not at all like he's holding a pair of tiny feet up in the air over a full diaper.

"Oh, shut up," says Arthur, stomping wholesale through the stacks of clothes and blankets. He'll come back later and deal with the disaster. "Explain the fucking soaker or whatever."

Eames smirks, but he does, and then he insists on Arthur doing the actual diaper change. The baby starts wailing the instant the cold wipes touch her skin, which is horrible; but at the least, it means that Arthur's attention fixes back on her completely. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry," he mutters helplessly as he fumbles his way through the cleaning and she continues to scream. Eames takes the old diaper away and Arthur fixes the new one in place, careful to check that the elastic isn't slipping around, that the diaper is secure, before he gently works her out of the soiled sleepers and clumsily stuffs her back into a fresh pair with Eames' guidance. She shrieks indignantly the whole time, and to Arthur's horror he honestly can't stop apologizing until the last snap is snapped and he's able to scoop her up, hold her close against his shoulder.

"That's it," Eames says, still naked, stroking a hand down her back. "That's it, sweetheart, Daddy's got you."

"Will she sleep?" Arthur asks, even though he wants instead to frown at how easily Eames is throwing that word around. "I mean, if we put her down?"

Eames' gaze goes squirrelly.

"Eames," Arthur checks, getting it abruptly, " _have_ you put her down? Ever?"

"I gave her to you, didn't I?" Eames hedges. "And to change her, of course."

"Oh my god," Arthur says, appalled. "You've been carrying her around constantly for three days? That's — no wonder you look like hell." He sighs. "I know you read the books. Sleep training! I flagged it!"

"She's so small," Eames says appealingly. "Arthur, look how small she is!"

"She has to learn to self-soothe," Arthur returns insistently, because for a con man, Eames' soft streak can run a mile wide. "Eames."

"Fine, you put her down, you cold-hearted, horrid," Eames begins, scowling, but Arthur cuts him off before he can work himself up too much.

"I was going to say, if we can get her to sleep in the bassinet, maybe we could have sex." Arthur arches an eyebrow, waiting for Eames' response.

"She's nearly a week old," Eames revises. "Best start in on the sleep training now."

 

Eames seems unconvinced that Arthur's actually going to succeed but between implementing the blanket swaddle Arthur remembers from the books, and finding and employing a pacifier, the baby falls asleep within fifteen minutes and doesn't so much as stir when Arthur gingerly sets her down in the bassinet in their bedroom.

"That's the sexiest thing you've ever done," Eames says, with deep sincerity. "Get over here so I can ravish you before I fall asleep standing up."

Arthur tugs the Billabong shirt over his head and gets a whiff of himself as he does. "I think I should shower too."

"You smell lovely, nonsense," says Eames.

"I smell like mouldering feet," Arthur corrects him, sniffing gingerly in the direction of his armpit. "And I haven't even taken my shoes off yet."

"Well, yes, you do reek a little," Eames agrees amiably, "but the point is that if I'm not actually having sex in the next two minutes I will be asleep."

"All right," Arthur says, unzipping his cargo shorts and toeing out of his sandals, "but I'm having a shower right after."

"Of course you are," says Eames, and tackles Arthur to the bed. Normally Arthur would at least make some vague gesture towards resisting — he hates it when Eames literally throws him around — but right now it just seems like an amazingly good thing, having all that weight and muscle bearing him down into a horizontal position, down against their soft them-smelling bed, squished under Eames' shoulders and hips. "I don't like your hair like this," says Eames, getting up on his palms long enough to scowl down at Arthur, and then he's shoving at Arthur with lazy tired hands, urging him up the mattress. Arthur goes, if clumsily, because he knows his reward is likely to involve Eames' mouth on him.

"Oh, well, why don't you get me a hat with fucking ears attached then," Arthur asks, and laughs when Eames bites his hip before moving over to mouth his cock. "Cover up — fuck, your mouth, I fucking missed your — cover up my hair, since it bothers you so much."

"You're not nearly sweet enough to merit ears on your clothing," Eames tells him, pulling off, palms wrapped hard around Arthur's hips even though Arthur's not going anywhere. "You should be so fucking lucky, darling."

"Get up here," Arthur says, "get up here, I think I'll pass out on you if you — come here."

Eames crawls up and lands on his side next to Arthur, kisses his shoulder and then works his way up to Arthur's neck, stroking his cock. Arthur reaches between them and finds Eames already hard, tries to match Eames stroke for stroke but he's already almost there. It's been too goddamn long, not since LA, and Paris before that, and only the couple of nights here after Eames came back from Norway, and okay — Arthur knows maybe he's getting greedy, but it's not being greedy anymore, it's — it's finally what they get, what they can expect from now on: sex when they want it, here in their bed, feet pushing against each other and knuckles bumping together and Eames' mouth —

"You can't," Arthur says automatically, because he's just realized that Eames is marking him, hard suction with teeth, up high on his neck. "Oh fuck," Arthur says, realizing, "you can, actually, you fucking"— and he comes like that, thinking about going around with the purpling bite on his neck for everyone to see, not a secret anymore. Eames pulls off and grins sharply like he gets it, why Arthur's coming, and it's all Arthur can do to keep his hand moving as the ebb of his orgasm threatens to pull him down into longed-for sleep. "Help me," Arthur says, kissing Eames' mouth, "come on, I want to make you come."

Eames' hand, wet from Arthur, wraps around Arthur's fist, and together they manage the half-dozen strokes it takes before Eames gasps and comes too. "Need a cloth or something," Arthur says, eyes closing helplessly, and he's too far gone to protest when he feels Eames using their fucking duvet cover that cost six hundred dollars, jesus, they're falling asleep naked on top of the covers and that's just the way it's going to be —

—"Fucking fuck," says Eames feelingly, about two seconds later, only it's been longer, must have been longer, because Arthur's a little cold and the baby is crying, and she wasn't crying when Arthur closed his eyes. "Oh bloody hell, we never should have had sex instead of three more minutes of sleep."

"Hey," says Arthur, offended, face still smushed into his pillow.

"Three more minutes would have been better than," Eames mutters, and the mattress heaves, and then there's the thump of his bare feet hitting the floor. "What's the trouble, kitten? Worked your hands free, have you? Clever girl."

Arthur's head feels like it weighs a hundred pounds, and it physically hurts to think about raising it off the pillow, but if Eames can do it — if Eames can do it — Arthur rolls onto his back and groans piteously. "How long was that?"

"Seventeen minutes," Eames says with unusual precision. "Could have been twenty. Twenty would have been heavenly."

Arthur mostly falls out of the bed but counts it as a win because his feet hit the floor first and they hold him up through some miracle of instinct. He staggers into the wall shoulder first, pivots, and somehow finds himself standing beside Eames, Eames who's hovering over the bassinet and fussing with the baby's blankets.

"She lost the pacifier," Arthur says, and feels around until he finds it in the seam between the side and bottom of the bassinet. "Here." He pops it in her mouth but she keeps wailing around it. "Put her on the bed, I'll do the swaddle again."

"No, she sleeps better in the sling," Eames says, "I'll go find the sling, wait."

"Eames, you can't lie down with her in the sling," Arthur points out, and then it hits him. "Shit, have you been sleeping sitting up?"

"She sleeps in the sling," Eames says with careful diction, sounding not unlike Arthur himself when he's arguing with Eames. "For more than seventeen minutes, I might add."

"Yes, and you sleep lying down. Like a normal human does," Arthur retorts, grinding the heel of his hand into his eye, desperately tired. "We talked about this. I'm too heavy a sleeper, we're not co-sleeping, it's dangerous. We're just going to have to tough it out until she learns to sleep on her own."

Eames glares at Arthur. The baby goes on screaming.

"Try it my way," Arthur bargains. "Let me just — one more time with the swaddle, okay?"

Eames steps away from the bassinet and waves Arthur in with a pissy gesture. Arthur ignores this, picks up the baby, lays her on the bed and does the swaddle a little tighter this time, something she can't work herself out of too easily. She quietens, easing from screaming into a more sedate whining, and that sound is more easily plugged up with the pacifier. Arthur picks her up again, a neat and weirdly stiff little bundle bound up in the blankets as she is, and settles her in the crook of his elbow.

"Try swaying," Eames suggests, slouched against the wall, obviously having lost any sense of Arthur being the least bit sexy. "No, no, side to side."

Arthur, feeling like an idiot, sways side to side, jounces, swivels from the waist, keeping his eyes fixed on the baby's, watching as her eyelids droop little by little, as her small body sags into the motion helplessly. She must be tired too, because it's only a matter of a minute or two before she's out again. Arthur gingerly lays her back in her bed, breathless and keyed up and yet so tired that he has to blink twice to resolve her little form back into a single baby.

"Right, let's see how long that lasts," Eames says, looking like he does when he's waiting his turn to shoot down one of Arthur's ideas on a job: bored, impatient, amused, only with an overriding aura of bone-deep exhaustion. He throws back the duvet, clambers into bed.

"We have to try," Arthur says, following him. "You can't sleep in a chair until she's," and he's asleep before he can finish the sentence.

The next thing Arthur knows, Eames is poking him in the shoulder saying, "Twenty-six minutes."

Arthur gets up, hits the wall harder this time with the same shoulder, swaddles the baby again (this time wrapping her arms separately) and plugs the pacifier back in. Sways and rocks and bounces until she nods off. Lays her down in the bassinet. Flops down onto the bed where Eames has gone back to snoring long before the baby stopped crying.

Twenty-four minutes the next time, and a delicious thirty-nine after that, but then it's only fifteen, only ten, only five, and Eames decides she's hungry now. Arthur stubs his toe on the way to the kitchen for a bottle and formula but he can't quite make the directions on the can stop swimming around before his eyes and he has to call Eames in for reinforcement. Eames comes out with the baby, hands her to Arthur, and takes over. It's companionable again, somehow, like the two-odd hours of sleep they've scraped together has almost been enough to return them both to bleary functionality.

"When I did black ops," Arthur says, watching Eames pour out the formula, screw the bottle together, "they gave us training in withstanding interrogation."

"Mm," Eames acknowledges vaguely, clicking on the warmer, fitting the bottle into it. He's not impressed by this fact, nor should he be; Eames is a military man himself, or was, even if Arthur's never quite been able to picture Eames in uniform and snapping off salutes. 

"I mean, it's not like they can practice torturing you," Arthur says. He looks down at the baby and gently presses the flat of his thumb against the middle of her pacifier, preventing her from spitting it out again. "So it's actually hours and hours in the classroom learning the theory and then maybe three or four hours total in a field exercise that simulates the interrogation conditions."

"What, with PASIV?" asks Eames, reaching out and stroking his fingers over the curls behind the baby's ears.  

"No," says Arthur, "with an air compressor."

"Jesus," says Eames, shaking his head slowly like a drunk. 

Arthur sags back against the counter and resettles the slight but warm weight in his arms. This forces him to abandon the gentle patting rhythm he'd set up against the baby's diapered bottom, and she arches her back and squawks in protest.  "Shh, shh," Arthur says, resuming the patting, adding a few swoops for good measure.  "No, not like that," he says to Eames, "just — they used it for the noise, air compressors are super noisy." The baby's quieting again under Arthur's ministrations, but she's starting to work harder at rejecting the pacifier, obviously convinced there must be something better on offer. "Here we'd spent the better part of eighteen hours commando-crawling through the forest after they dropped us in the middle of nowhere, avoiding the guys playing the part of enemy combatants, eating MREs cold out of the foil bags — and then when we finally got captured they were supposed to pretend to grill us for intel. Of course they couldn't waterboard us for it, so they locked us in a room with the air compressor motor, turned it on, and left us sitting cuffed to these hard backed chairs."  His mouth curls at the memory.  "The idea was that, between the discomfort and the noise level, we wouldn't be able to sleep, they'd torture us that way."

Eames snorts, reaching out and testing the bottle's sides with his fingertips even though the thing hasn't clicked off yet.  "I take it that this was a failed attempt on their part?"

"I was out like a fucking light in about thirty seconds," Arthur nods with a half-laugh, swaying back and forth, back and forth.  "They ended up having to send one of their guys in every thirty minutes to wake us up."  He pauses, frowning with sudden confusion.  "What was the point of that story?"

"I think you were either saying that you'll sleep through anything – which I knew about you anyway – or that, thus far, you're finding that parenthood is shockingly similar to the US Army's idea of torture," Eames says, pausing midway through for a jaw-cracking yawn.

"The second one," Arthur says, yawning back helplessly.  He looks down at the squirming baby, then over at the bottle warmer, and then back at the baby. "She's so small, I guess her fuel tank needs refilling pretty often." It's not a conscious decision; Arthur's only aware that he's bowed down to kiss her forehead after he's coming back up with warming cheeks.

"Amazing how quickly she gets to you, isn't it?" Eames observes with his rumbling tired voice.

"Stockholm syndrome," Arthur says, not denying it.  "All this bullshit about oxytocin and bonding is just glorified Stockholm syndrome, Eames."

Eames laughs and the bottle warmer clicks off. It doesn't really take two of them to do this, to hold a bottle and fix a bib around her neck and watch as she sucks busily and with frowning face, but Arthur doesn't care — he likes having his fingers tangled up with Eames' around the glass bottle, likes Eames' sleepy heat bumping against him, their foreheads striving in a friendly way as they both try to get a good view of something neither of them would have found the least bit interesting only months ago.

"I'm glad you're here," Eames says. "It's nice, not being the only hostage."

"You should sleep," Arthur says, "I've got this."

"Oh my god," says Eames, shifting away from blind staring fatigue into something like his usual animation, drawing back enough to gaze adoringly at Arthur. "Are you saying I can sleep uninterrupted?"

"I'm sexy again, aren't I?" Arthur says, managing a grin, looking down at the baby's dribbly chin.

"You're unbearably sexy," says Eames, and kisses Arthur soundly on the eyebrow. "Don't come near me for three hours." He's gone before Arthur can say much more, retreating into their bedroom with stumbling if eager steps.

 

"She needs a name," is the first thing Arthur says when Eames reemerges some six hours later. Eames is tousle-headed, rumpled, bare-footed, but obviously blissed out from so much continuous sleep, happy and rosy-cheeked as he usually only is after a really epic fucking session.

"What's this thing? I never saw it before," Eames says, coming over to frown down at the baby in the oscillating seat. "Where were you hiding it? It's bloody marvellous, she's out like a light."

"It was folded up in the under-crib storage," Arthur answers. "It's called a Mamaroo. I think she likes it."

"Good lord, it's got settings," says Eames, crouching down now to peer at the control panel. "Ha, ocean wave. I'd fancy one of these for me, it looks dead lovely. How big do they come?"

"Here, have coffee," Arthur says, pouring out a cup for Eames, trying to lure his attention away from the mesmerizing spectacle of the baby sleeping alone. "Joy made muffins too."

"Starving, god," Eames groans, and stands up, grabs a muffin and takes the coffee. On eye level with Arthur again, Eames seems to remember the more usual civilities, and he grants Arthur a fond smile and a kiss before tucking into the food and drink. "I knew a charming girl once, name of Tiffany," he says, between bites.

"No," says Arthur, "and don't forget I've seen you barter in the market a million times. I know an opening position when I hear one from you." He stifles a yawn behind his fist. "If that's your game, my grandmother's name was Winnifred."

"Heaven forfend," Eames says, eyes going wide. "Right, fine, what about Catherine?"

"Ugh," says Arthur. "The meanest girl in eighth grade was named Catherine."

"Mm, never do then," Eames answers. "Katie?"

"No, she needs a real name, a full name," Arthur says. "A strong name."

They both stare down at the baby going around and around in her little capsule, tiny fists curled, mouth pursing to suck at the air.

"Maybe we should name her after beer," Eames says, taking a different tack. "Stella."

"Corona," Arthur returns.

"Kronenbourg."

"Grolsch."

"Heineken."

Arthur hesitates. "Okay, we have to stop, because I was seriously considering Heineken for a minute there."

"It does sound good with Eames."

Arthur tries it out and starts giggling. "It sounds like a place in Australia."

"Gooloogong Eames," suggests Eames, in his broadest Aussie accent. "Manangatang Eames."

"Toowoomba Eames," Arthur adds, snorting now.

Eames sets down his coffee and wipes his mouth, shaking his head and grinning. "No, she should have your last name, we decided that much. Your name hasn't been swanned all over dreamshare like mine."

Arthur pulls a face. It's one thing when Eames says his name — the _way_ Eames says his name — but most of his life he's pretty much hated the surname he'd been born with.

"It's on all the paperwork already," Eames points out. "Legally, at the moment, this one's name is Baby Darling, and you know we can't leave her like that."

"Jesus fuck, Baby Darling,” Arthur says, and the giggles are starting up all over again. "You're right, we can't go around calling her Baby, everyone will think that her gay dads named her after the Swayze movie."

"Nobody puts Baby in a," Eames starts, but he stops when Arthur pummels his arm hard enough, laughing. "Ow, fuck off," he says good-naturedly as he gets Arthur in a loose headlock that shifts into a hug. "You should go have a kip," Eames advises, squeezing Arthur. "Just fill me in on when she last pooped her pants and ate."

"I should stay up now, it's daytime," Arthur protests, but he's already yawning again, lulled a bit by the heat coming off Eames' body.

"It's not like jetlag, parenthood," Eames tells him. "It's an ultramarathon. Nap when you bloody well can, hmm?"

"If you insist," Arthur says, giving in far more easily than he usually would. "She pooped around eleven o'clock and I fed her right before that."

"Lovely, thanks," Eames says, and shoves Arthur upright. "Off you go."

"And I spent two hours tidying her room so don't mess it all up again," Arthur warns him. "Eames, I'm serious."

"Go to sleep, Daddy Darling," Eames says, waving his fingers at Arthur, picking up his coffee cup again.

 

Arthur showers first – finally – and then changes the sheets on the bed before crawling in and dropping into oblivion. He wakes several hours later with the late afternoon sun warming his face and back, and a general sense of clearheadedness he's missed over the last frantic weeks of the inception job and then the difficult journey homewards. Arthur gets up, dresses, and stands in front of the mirror with his totem in his palm for about ten seconds before he lets himself admit that he is actually embarrassingly desperate to see Eames and the baby.

He finds both of them sitting outside on the back porch, shaded by the thatched palm leaf awning. Eames has got _Parenting from the Inside Out_ pressed open on his lap, his phone to his ear, and the baby back in the sling.

"Well, I'm not saying I would be interested in the bounty," Eames is saying into the phone in a tone that suggests the opposite, "I'm just curious about the details, yeah?" There's a pause. Eames waves Arthur over to the other chair with the spine of the book and uses his knuckles to slide the plate of thinly sliced rye bread spread with cream cheese and cucumber towards Arthur. "No, I've no idea where he is," says Eames while Arthur pokes around the plate and comes up with the slice with the least cucumber. "It's all purely hypothetical."

Arthur works his way through another three slices of bread while Eames goes on chattering to his contact, working as only Eames can to gather more information than the other person ever intended to share. Near the end of the call the baby suddenly begins to fuss and Eames finishes up quickly, pacing and swaying his way back and forth across the porch in an effort to soothe. Arthur watches, amused.

"You look better," Eames says once he's off the phone.

"How much am I worth today?" Arthur asks. "And can I hold her?"

"Absolutely you can," Eames says, wriggling the wrap up and over his head, lifting the baby out, "her nappy is ripe for your attention, darling." Arthur takes her (though not without a slight eyeroll in Eames' direction) and settles her little body against his shoulder. She smells vaguely rotten, it's true, but she feels warm and soft and satisfying in his arms. Arthur kisses the side of her head and grins helplessly. "And if I turned you in today, I could very comfortably set up house for me and this little _mtoto_ 6 in Malibu if I liked," Eames adds, sitting down again.

Arthur raises his eyebrows and settles back into his chair, blowing out a breath he hadn't realized he was holding. "That much?"

"That much," affirms Eames grimly, and helps himself to a slice of bread. "Look, Arthur, I might have to go for a few days to sort this out properly."

"No way," Arthur says immediately, "no, Saito can do it. Eames, you're not going anywhere."

"Just long enough to be sure of things," Eames says, frowning, shaking his head. "You can't leave the house, it has to be me."

"Well, let's ask someone else," Arthur says, casting about for ideas, "someone we can trust, someone local in the business."

"There isn't anyone local in the business," Eames says, sensibly. "That's why we chose Mombasa, darling. And if you think for a minute I'm going to tell that slimy dream den operator that we live in his town after what he did to us"—

—"God, no," Arthur chimes in fervently, shaking his head. "I just — what about Natasha?"

Eames sighs shortly and sets down his food. "Putting aside the fact that she's a week post-partum, I'd say she's done us the biggest favor we could ask of her already, wouldn't you?"

"Fuck," says Arthur feelingly, and the baby abruptly starts crying again as if agreeing with this sentiment. "I'll go change her, give me a minute," he says, rising. It's not logical, the panic he feels at the thought of Eames leaving. Eames has dealt with much worse before; there's no question of his competence, the way he'd pulled them all through the Fischer debacle just a week earlier. Arthur himself wouldn't think anything of it if the tables were turned, a matter of some quiet digging about, some money judiciously applied, and some rumours carefully planted. Done properly, there's really no danger in the task, and more importantly there's no way that anyone would connect the dots between Eames and Arthur, which has always been their biggest concern, and always will be, now.

Arthur lays the baby down on the changing table and fumbles with the snaps on her sleeper, gets her legs free and then pauses with her foot cupped in the hollow of his right hand as he stares down at her, squirming and fussing and vigorously, furiously alive. Arthur's pulse slams wildly in his throat as terror grips him all over again. Here she is, life so new that she's still got a little bit of umbilical cord attached, so raw and fresh that her only way of interacting is to squall. Arthur thinks he loves her already, at least a little, but — but is it enough? It can't be enough; she deserves infinite adoration, Arthur senses, and he fears that he's too mundane for that. Eames can't leave him alone with this. He can't.

Arthur's not sure how long he's frozen like this, but eventually he blinks his way back to the present and hastens to get on with changing the baby's diaper. It will all be fine, Arthur tells himself as he wipes meticulously and applies diaper cream, snaps the baby into a fresh diaper. Eames will do what needs doing and come home to them, and then — _then_ — everything will be right at last. Arthur discards the sleeper the baby has worn all day and finds, instead, a tiny pair of brown leggings, a smocked top, miniature socks, a hat without ears. She looks faintly ridiculous in the clothes, which are maybe a size too large, but Arthur likes it anyway; she's like a tiny person now, and that makes it a bit easier to pick her up again and take her back out to where Eames is waiting.

"You're brilliant at everything," Eames says, like he can tell that Arthur's coming off the tail end of a very quiet panic attack. "You'll be better than me by the time I get back."

"You know what they say," Arthur answers, hearing his own voice taut and a little too low, "about — elephants."

"Right," says Eames, leaning in to tug at the baby's hat, pulling it slightly askew because that's what Eames does. "Elephants and arseholes."

Arthur shifts his grip so he can grab Eames by the wrist, hold him in place for a minute. "Eames," he says, "two hands, yours and mine. Not — not two of mine and none of yours. Right?"

Eames is still for a moment and then he nods a little roughly, swallowing. "What about — do you fancy the name Clara?"

"Frances," Arthur shoots back, letting Eames go, letting the whole thing go — for now.

"Ruth."

"Nancy," Arthur says, tipping the baby down so he can see her face. "No, you're not a Nancy, are you?"

"Sylvie?" Eames tries, stroking her cheek. "Ella?"

 

That evening he and Eames give little Diana-Julia-definitely-not-Susan a bath. It's the most terrifying thing Arthur's done this month, and this month has included fighting for sanity and Dom's freedom while gravity tossed him around like he was inside a dryer drum. The baby is slippery when wet, impossibly smaller, and screams bloody murder the entire time. Arthur and Eames alternately apologize to her and snap at each other, taking it in turns to prop her slick naked little body up in the baby bath recliner and to swish warm soapy water into the folds of her skin.

Joy, who's staying late to help with laundry, very busily ignores their struggles and snippiness. Her only word on the subject of the baby to Arthur has been "I'm not a nanny. You want a nanny, I have a niece who can come," but for all that, Arthur catches her shooting sidelong glances at them. He harbours a deep suspicion that she thinks they're both helpless idiots.

When they manage to get the towel soaking wet before even touching the baby with it, Arthur can't really argue with this opinion.

"Joy, can you," Arthur half-asks, frustrated, frozen with his hands locked under the baby's slippery wet armpits. She's arching her back and shrieking now, and it's winding Arthur up more and more — is she cold? Is she scared? Does she feel unsafe? "Another towel?" he asks, and throws caution to the wind, just hefts the baby up from the water and lays her soaking wet and squirming against his shoulder. So much for dry clean only, he thinks as the water floods through cloth, but thank god — she's calming now, soothed by his warmth and the pressure of his body along her front.

Joy brings a towel over but instead of melting away as soon as Eames takes it, she stands and watches Eames wrap it over Arthur and the baby both.

"That baby's skin is going to dry out," she says, shaking her head.

"I have this," Arthur says, slapping around the counter and holding up the small bottle of organic baby moisturizer with jojoba oil, chamomile-scented. “We'll put it on her now."

"No, no," she says, and lays out a second towel on the kitchen table, goes over and grabs down the extra virgin olive oil from the pantry. "Bring her here, I will show you."

Arthur locks gazes with Eames, who is clearly urging him to _let the nice lady help_ , so Arthur goes over and lays the baby down on the thick warm towel, drying her off gently. Joy unscrews the bottle and pulls Arthur's palm in, pours a little puddle of oil into the hollow of his hand. "Warm it up between your hands," she says, "go on."

Arthur had sort of vaguely expected Joy to come to the rescue and do this herself, but he does as she directs and spreads the oil over both palms until it feels warm as his skin.

"Now rub it into her belly," Joy says, "gently gently."

Arthur's done this before, of course — to Eames, after a bad muscle injury once or twice — but never with so breathless a touch, and never with plain olive oil. Still, the oil goes into the baby's skin very easily, sets up a rich healthy sheen that makes her pale cocoa skin look even more gorgeous. The baby quiets under his touch, bit by bit, like she's enjoying the massage too.

"Hair too, it goes very dry if you aren't careful," Joy says, and Eames takes over, his fingers bumping into Arthur's.

" _Asante_ ," Eames says to Joy, voice fond and warm. Arthur doesn't pretend to understand what's between Eames and Joy, but he knows they like each other much more than either generally lets on. "You should go home, we can finish the last load, mama."

"No, I will finish," Joy says. "You want my niece to come help Mr. Arthur while you're away?"

Arthur answers for Eames. "Yes, please," he says emphatically, going cold just imagining another bath time with only his hands to manage everything.

Joy smiles and nods, heads back towards the laundry room.

"She thinks we're terrible parents," Arthur says, reaching for a clean diaper, lifting up the baby's hips.

"No," Eames says, smiling a little, "no, she knows we're new, that's all. We'll work it out."

Arthur snaps the diaper closed, a quick action that's already become almost second nature to him. "Pass me her sleepers?"

Bath, pyjamas, bottle, and Eames reading a story while Arthur swaddles her tight: it's the seed, Arthur suspects, of a nighttime routine for them, hard as it is to imagine anything so small and predictable and normal being a daily part of their lives now.

"Phoebe," Eames tries, kissing her forehead.

"Maria," Arthur returns.

"Leah."

"What's a name that means 'sleeps through the night'?" Arthur asks.

 

"She still out?" Eames asks when he comes back from driving Joy home. "Blimey, she liked her spa day, didn't she?"

"She really did," Arthur says, looking up from his laptop, glancing over at the cradle where he can just make out one fist curling and uncurling slowly with infant dreams. "Hey, have we got any good photos of her yet? All I've got is this one from your cell phone."

Eames comes over and leans down over Arthur's shoulder, more of a tired flop than a proper embrace. "Our only camera, my lovely Arthur," he says, pushing his face into the side of Arthur's neck, "is very expensive and wondrous but only has great whopping telephoto lenses to go with it."

"Well," says Arthur, "surveillance." He types a little, mildly distracted by the tickle of Eames' beard against his skin.

"We need one of those little point-and-shoot things," Eames says, "the kind that you don't use to spy on businessmen and their mistresses."

"Yes," says Arthur, "a crappy cheap camera, and a minivan, and everything we own covered in brown plaid vinyl for easy clean-up." He frowns, leaning away from Eames a little. "We discussed this."

"Fine," says Eames, straightening up, folding hands over Arthur's shoulders. "I'll pull back the mosquito netting over the cradle so you can go out in the neighbor's yard, climb a tree, and take some lovely photos of our daughter through the window."

"How about a portrait lens?" Arthur suggests dryly, ignoring Eames' sarcasm.

"Is it less than a thousand pounds?" Eames asks despairingly, and that's it: Arthur has to laugh and tug Eames back down so he can kiss Eames' temple, he just has to.

"You're the cheapest con man in the world," Arthur tells him, not without affection. "We have a bit of money, you know, especially after that last job."

"Mm," growls Eames, fighting back a reluctant smile. "Who are you emailing anyway?" His hands have started wandering a bit, slipping down to feel up Arthur's chest. Arthur's doing his level best to ignore if not actually discourage this behaviour.

"Ian," Arthur answers, typing again. "Thought he should know he's an uncle now." He finishes attaching the grainy photo that Eames had sent and hesitates over the rest of the email. "What else do you say, other than 'it's a girl and we don't have a name'?"

"How much she weighed and how tall," Eames prompts as he pops open a button in the middle of Arthur's chest, slides his hand into the space between undershirt and shirt. 

Arthur looks up at him, shocked. "Holy shit, I never even asked."

"Of course you didn't, you were a bit distracted at the time," Eames answers, unbothered, tugging Arthur's undershirt up and out of his waistband. "She was six pounds eight ounces and eighteen inches long."

"Eighteen!" Arthur repeats with amazement.

"Oh, wait," says Eames, "maybe that's my cock size, I can't," and he's forced to stop when Arthur reaches over to poke at his side. "Hey, you should finish that email tomorrow," Eames says, squirming away from Arthur's hand but not budging the hand that's still busily groping Arthur's chest.

"What, have you got eighteen inches of something I need to see?" Arthur asks, amused, closing his laptop anyway.

"Settle for ten and a half?" Eames says, lifting an eyebrow, quirking his mouth, and slipping his fingers down, down, down until they're flirting with Arthur's belt buckle.

"Oh my god, you wish," Arthur laughs, but he reaches down and gamely opens his belt and fly anyway. "What, right here?"

"I promised you no minivans," Eames says, "and if you recall, you promised me"—

—"Kitchen sex?" Arthur finishes for him, doubtfully. "I don't remember promising"—

—"You promised me that we wouldn't turn into the boring gays in the loveless suburban marriage," Eames persists, like he's not getting felt up at this very moment, Arthur's hand working on Eames' fly.

"I never promised anything of the kind," Arthur tells him, "but you know we won't. Come here, come," and he grabs Eames by the shirt tails and hauls him around to stand in front of Arthur. "God, I just —" Arthur lunges forward a little shamelessly and presses his face into Eames' open fly, breathing shakily against the hardness there. "Has it really been weeks and weeks since I," Arthur begins, dizzy with Eames' scent, feeling the want claw at his gut sudden and rough, "I haven't had my mouth on your cock for ages."

"I was thinking that very thought earlier," Eames says, "and it's the saddest thing I've thought in a long while." He sounds calm but when his hands move in to tug his underwear down, they're trembling just a little.

"I don't think we could ever be the boring gays," Arthur says, darting in to press an open-mouthed kiss to the base of Eames' cock. "We've been married two years, together for, what — five? — and I still," and he finishes the sentence by closing his lips around the head of Eames' cock and not trying to hold back the hum of satisfaction that wants to rise from his throat. God, _Eames_.

For all Eames likes sucking Arthur's cock, for all he's really fucking good at it, Arthur knows that Eames will never quite understand what it is to Arthur when it's the other way around, having Eames thick in his mouth, making room for Eames, taking him down even when it's too much, too good, too — Arthur exhales hard through his nose and lets his throat go lax, and Eames knows well enough to take this hint, rolling his hips inward and trapping Arthur's face between his hands, using him for a moment or two. It's a weird primal pleasure, more so even than when Eames is inside him, and it probably goes back to when Arthur was tiny as their daughter is now, back to that animal comfort of having something in his mouth, but it's good, it's good, it makes Arthur feel — makes him _feel_ , stop thinking, stop thinking — "Oh, fuck," Eames is groaning above him, hips working in small needy circles, "Arthur, your mouth, fuck, can't come like this."

 _Yes you can, yes, you should,_ Arthur thinks, sucking harder, mindless, but Eames is holding still now, Eames is pressing his thumb gently into the corner of Arthur's mouth to break the suction so he can pull away.

"Another minute," Eames tells him, "and —"

—"I know, I wanted you to," Arthur says, uncurling his fingers from where they'd probably been holding Eames' hips a little too tight.

"No, I — I want you to feel me in you still tomorrow," Eames says, hastening now to undress, red-cheeked and with a droplet of sweat snaking down the line of his jaw, "come on, clothes off."

"Tomorrow, when you leave," Arthur agrees, mind clearing up a little now. "Right, yeah, you're right." He stands up, tilts into the tabletop a little on shaky legs, and stays leaning there while he pulls his clothes loose and flings them to the floor. "God, we should hurry, she could wake up any," he says, catching sight of the cradle.

"She won't," Eames says firmly, like he's giving an order to a six day old baby. "God, Arthur, I mean to fuck you into next week."

Arthur grins; he loves it when Eames says shit like that, as though he's supposed to be anything other than wildly supportive of the idea. "Go get the lube, then," he says, and hitches his hips back so he's perched on the edge of the table, comfortable on the towel still spread there from earlier. "Hurry up."

"Not going anywhere," Eames says, and snags the fancy organic baby oil off the counter, grinning. "It's full-service with me: fucking and aromatherapy."

"I won't tell you how much that shit cost, then," Arthur laughs, and holds out a hand for the bottle. "Here, let me."

"By all fucking means," Eames says, passing it over and promptly wrapping a hand around his cock like he's expecting a good show.

Arthur does his best to oblige, shifting back a bit more so he can pull a heel up to the table, spread his thighs open, work a finger in a little cautiously because he's not totally sure that luxury organic baby products are quite — but it's fine, and it really does smell kind of nice, and the oil is slick and thin enough that it's easy to switch to two fingers almost right away. "Here," Arthur says, and arcs the bottle back to Eames underhand, his other hand still busy pushing oil inside, stretching. "Now you."

It's — inspirational, motivational, watching Eames pour out a little of the oil and then slick it down over his cock. Arthur wants that, he wants Eames in him, and he works his hand a little harder, deeper, in anticipation.

"Enough, come on," Arthur says, more to himself than Eames, and he slides down off the table top, reaches for Eames and tows him in close enough for kissing while Eames goes on working his cock, less jerking off and more just groping himself thoroughly. "How do you want," Arthur half-asks, slinging his arms over Eames' shoulders, his biceps, Eames massive and taut and deeply miraculously interested in Arthur's own less imposing body. "On the counter?"

"No, turn round," Eames says, letting go of his cock and doing the turning for Arthur, "bend over, there's a love."

"Boring married suburban," Arthur recites, amused, as he goes, as he gets his forearms on the table and widens his stance, as Eames moves in with an arm under Arthur's hips and holds him steady for the long tight-burn-good of that first press inside. "Right, that's us — oh, fuck, Eames, fuck."

"There's the first nine inches," Eames says, panting and laughing, "ready for the next nine?"

"Feels like it," Arthur says sincerely, "holy shit, you feel so — huge, yeah, keep going, fuck."

"I do love it when your flattery has such a ring of truth to it," Eames says, "but stop squirming for a moment, I'm nearly," and Arthur has to focus on it because he really had been sort of mindlessly wriggling, delighted by the hard length of Eames inside him — but now Eames pushes in all the way as Arthur exhales messily, and the air smells like expensive oils and the terrycloth is soft under Arthur's cheek.

"Fuck," Arthur says feelingly, "Eames, you — move, come on, fuck me."

"Like it's so simple," Eames says, "you're like a vise-grip on my cock, god, just — give me a moment. And don't bloody laugh, it's true."

Arthur is maybe laughing a little, but it's at least half a sort of giddy hysteria. It's all too good to be true, fucking bare in the kitchen with their baby asleep ten feet away. Arthur closes his eyes and reminds himself of dinner before this, of bathing the baby, of sitting out in the garden with Eames. It's real, it's real.

"Yes, there you go," Eames agrees, "that's — all right, I can," and he holds Arthur steady while he pulls out and slides in again, and it's deliciously raw, skin on skin with only a sheen of oil between them. On the next thrust Arthur pushes back into Eames' hips, and a moment later they've found their rhythm, moving slow and deliberate and exquisite, Eames leaning down so his front is draped over Arthur's back, sweat springing up between them, Eames' hot face between Arthur's shoulder blades.

"Okay, okay," Arthur says after a while, shrugging his shoulders back, dislodging Eames, "now about fucking me into next week?"

"Right, I did say," Eames says, shifting back, hauling on Arthur's hips for better leverage, "and try not to wake the baby, hmm?"

Arthur closes his mouth over the meat of his forearm even though he knows Eames was teasing, because it's good when Eames does this, takes him hard and furious and dirty, and Arthur's pretty sure he's not going to hold it all in. Sure enough, it only takes Eames a minute or two to really get going, and Arthur has to bite down on his skin, concentrate on being able to hear the slap of skin, Eames' laboured breathing, because otherwise he couldn't be sure what sort of appreciative noises he'd be making, fuck — fuck, _Eames_ , so strong and so good at this besides, like he could keep going for hours if Arthur needed him to, except — "God," Arthur says, lifting his head, "god, Eames, I need to come, your hand, please."

"Yeah, course," Eames says, sounding wonderfully stupid, and then his hand closes around Arthur's cock, messy fisted strokes that are more than enough with all Arthur's nerve endings firing white hot and fast-fast-fast. "Arthur, shh, jesus christ," Eames is saying, but Arthur doesn't care, he doesn't, he's — fuck, coming over Eames' fist and up his own belly and Eames is fucking him hard through it, hurrying to come too. Arthur's too far gone to feel it, really, which is a pity, but he knows when Eames is coming anyway because he knows that little sweet sound Eames makes, that abrupt deep stillness, and the way his fingers knead in and out of Arthur's sides as he eases down. Arthur's himself again by the time Eames pulls out slowly, and he can't help a pleased laugh at the feeling of it, the slip of Eames' cock so much wetter than it went in.

"She's still sleeping," Arthur says, letting his arms fold under him, collapsing belly-down to the table. "It's a miracle." Then, a panicked throb, and he starts up, blinking over at the cradle. "Oh, god, is she okay?"

"Oh fuck, I," Eames says, hurrying over, peering in at her, "no, she's fine, she's fine, fuck."

"You sure?" Arthur says, heart racing, shifting dizzily from post-coital laziness into fear. "She's okay?"

"Yeah, I can see her chest moving, she's — smacking her lips, she's fine," Eames says, and his legs go out from under him as he laughs with relief and pleasure, collapsing naked to the kitchen floor. "Fucking hell, Arthur, that was amazing, just now."

"Yeah, it was, wasn't it?" Arthur says, managing to find a chair for his own wobbly-legged descent, dragging the towel with him to minimize the spread of the mess they've made. He beams over at Eames. "I can't believe we just did that in front of her. With baby oil as lube."

"We're probably unfit parents," Eames says, not without pride. "Good thing no one knows."

"Our little," Arthur says, gasping still, "our little secret. Are you sure she's okay?"

"Baby Darling," Eames says, poking his head over into the cradle again, "Daddy wants to know if you're traumatized." He lifts a hand and shifts her blanket a little. "God, she's sweet. I can't bear the thought of leaving her."

"Then don't," Arthur says, even though it's a token protest.

"Baba will miss you," Eames says quietly, and ducks his head in to kiss her.

"Baba?" Arthur repeats, surprised. "I thought you wanted us both to be 'dad'."

"It's what the nurse kept calling me, at the hospital," Eames says, stroking a hand over the baby's downy head. "It's just Swahili for 'father', that's all."

"It's —" Arthur pauses, considering it. "It's perfect, actually."

"Isn't it?" Eames says, and looks over at Arthur with a wide pleased grin. "If only she was so easy to name."

 

_To: ian.darling@uic.edu_  
 _From: arthur.darling@gmail.com_  
 _Subject: more photos_

_These are just snaps off my iPhone but better than the last one I sent, Eames' blackberry is ancient as fuck. Still no name — I know, we're working on it! She's awesome though. We're talking about bringing her over to meet everyone in a few months._

_Can you print these out and show them to Dad? I keep missing him when I call, I guess it's busy at the garage this week, but I left a message that she's here at least._

_Thanks for the link to your game highlights. Where did I get such a tall little brother anyway? Your jump shot is sick!_

_Hot here this week, and Eames is away for work for a few days, so we're chilling in the air conditioning inside, just the two of us. I never thought I could get by on so little sleep and be totally fine with it. Yesterday I cleaned poop off a hat. Fatherhood, huh._

_Love ya,_

_Arthur_

 

_To: arthur.dearborne@gmail.com_  
 _From: dommalcobb@mac.com_  
 _Subject: Those contacts_

_Hi Arthur,_

_Hope all is well with you. We're readjusting here, bit by bit. It's good to be home, but it's hard too. Anyway, I did some asking around for you as requested and there were a few people interested to hear that you might be out for hire as a consultant on the legal side of dreamshare. I'm attaching a short list of names for you to contact if you're still looking for that kind of work._

_I'm glad to know you didn't burn all your bridges when you threw your lot in with me, to tell you the truth. I would say something about how much I owe you but — well, I woke up today with my little girl curled up beside me in bed. If you're a parent, someday, you'll know exactly how much means to me, and that it's more than I could ever repay._

_Come visit us sometime._

_Dom_

 

_To: Martin Radcliffe_  
 _From: arthur.dearborne@gmail.com_  
 _Subject: Consultant Services_

_Hi Martin,_

_I know it's been some time since we last spoke but I wanted you to be among the first to know that I'm starting a new consulting firm in the areas of mind share technology and security. At this time I'm offering short-term contracts (no longer than three weeks) providing subconscious security training for your key executives as well as remote consultation on a retainer basis. Please find attached my fee schedule. As I'm just starting out building a client base, I'm approaching only a very select group of top executives familiar with my work and will not be accepting more than a few clients, so I'd urge you to act quickly if you're interested._

_I look forward to hearing from you,_

_Arthur_

 

_To: natasha.dee@gmail.com_  
 _From: arthur.darling@gmail.com_  
 _Subject: Dinner_

_I'm making Irish stew on Friday night, it's a Chicagoan delicacy. Come down to Mombasa and eat with me? I'm going insane without another adult to talk to. I promise I won't ask you to hold her unless you want to._

 

_To: arthur.darling@gmail.com_  
 _From: natasha.dee@gmail.com_  
 _Subject: Re: Dinner_

_It's too soon, Arthur, but thank you for asking. I promise I will come sometime._

_Eames tells me you still haven't named her. I leave you the first name but I have a suggestion for the middle name, if you want something Kiswahili?_

 

_Incoming Text from Eames:_

_It's done. Be home in time for Irish stew. Take off knickers now._  


* * *

  
It's nearly dark when he arrives, the air hot and sticky. Eames moves swiftly through a cloud of deja-vu as he takes the front steps in two long leaps and then starts wrestling with the locks and deadbolts of the front door. The alarm beeps softly to announce his entrance and the front hall smells like gravy and beef and potato, but the lights are off in the doorway to the kitchen and everything is very still.

They're in the front room, Arthur asleep on the couch with the baby secure under crossed arms, belly to belly. Eames has been gone for four days but he's startled by the change in her, already, the way her little arms and legs are starting to fill out from newborn delicacy into infant roundness. Her hair is darker and longer and erupting into riotous curls at the nape of her neck, a tiny milk blister dotting her perfectly shaped upper lip, her whole colour deepening towards a warm Kikuyu brown. Her dummy has fallen from her lips and wound up wedged, glistening wet and pointing up, in Arthur's armpit. Arthur himself looks damnably well-groomed for someone who's been single-handedly parenting a newborn for days on end, shaven and showered and wearing clean clothes and matching socks.

Eames drops his bag to the floor and kneels up onto the couch at the far end, carefully planting one knee between Arthur's calves and the other next to the back of the couch before stretching his hands up and wriggling in next to Arthur, squeezing between him and the cushions. They fit here, the two of them; they've tried it before with some success. Arthur wakes a little as Eames settles, his hands shifting hastily to make sure the baby's okay before he turns his head and looks over at Eames.

"We fell asleep waiting for you," he says, smiling. "You're home?"

"Want to check your totem?" Eames asks, patting up Arthur's pockets in a friendly way, finding them empty.

"Don't need it," Arthur says. "Got her."

"She's your new totem?" Eames asks, snuggling in, curving his palm over the back of her lovely head.

"Guess so," Arthur answers with a small pleased sigh. "I think — I think I came up with a name. If you like it."

"Not Baby Darling?" Eames checks.

"Not," says Arthur. "Well, Natasha suggested her middle name, and I liked it."

"Mm?" prompts Eames. He drifts a thumb over the baby's mouth just to feel the softness of her lips.

"Siti," Arthur says carefully. "It's Swahili, it's — well, you'd know, I guess."

"Respected woman," Eames agrees. "It's a good name."

"And for her first name," Arthur says, "I thought maybe something connected with your family, since she has my last name. So I did a little research on your family tree."

"You're not thinking of naming her after my mother?" Eames asks, shocked. "You hate my mother. _I_ hate my mother. Besides, her name is Hortensia, it's dreadful."

"No, not her," Arthur says, "but I remembered you saying you had a great-aunt you —"

—"Aunt Peggy, yes," says Eames, and then gets it. "Margaret. Oh, yes, Margaret. Arthur, it's lovely." He lunges up and kisses the corner of Arthur's mouth. "Mummy will hate it. Wonderful."

"Margaret Siti Darling," Arthur says, audibly relishing the sound of it. "It sounds right, doesn't it?"

Eames nods, tracing his fingers down the lines of Margaret's little arms, her back, her cushy diapered bottom. Margaret Siti Darling on all the birth announcements, Margaret Siti Darling off to her first day at school in her little red gingham uniform, Margaret Siti Darling with long legs and wild hair refusing to practice piano, Margaret Siti Darling laughing and clever and tall, travelling the world, breaking rules, making things happen, having brilliant ideas, having lazy afternoons in love. It's a good name, Eames thinks, even though he's never put much stock in names, has donned and shed them like clothes for most his adult life. Maybe Margaret will too, maybe someday she'll reinvent herself entirely, but he thinks that even then, even if that happens — she will know deep down that she has been named, she has been loved, she's been willed into life by him and by Arthur, her parents.

"I made stew," says Arthur. "It's in the crock pot."

"It can wait," Eames says. "Let's just lie here for a bit, you and me and Margaret."  


  


* * *

  
**Footnotes:**

1"Good morning."(back)

2"We'll cross that bridge when we come to it, mama." Eames uses 'mama' here as a form of respectful address from a younger person to an older woman. This is a common element among many subsaharan African cultures, but it wouldn't be the typical state of relations between employer and domestic employee, particularly crossing racial lines.(back)

3An exclamation of shock or surprise.(back)

4A minibus-style shared taxi, a common style of public transport in Kenya but often packed with people and not terribly safe viewed through western eyes.(back)

5"Mama! I'm dying!"(back)

6 _Mtoto_ means 'baby'. (back)

**Author's Note:**

>  **(More) Author’s Notes, for those who actually care about this sort of thing:**
> 
> Arthur’s story about learning techniques to resist interrogation is actually from a relative of mine who was a fighter pilot in the RCAF, and he too had no problem falling asleep with an air compressor roaring beside him. (He also had three small children at home; coincidence?) My relative, of course, was not trained on PASIV — at least, to my knowledge. Canada can’t afford multiple tanks, I think we’re not big on experimental dreamshare technology.
> 
> Eames’ proverbs (both of them — about hands, and about elephants/arseholes) are actual Swahili proverbs. I was looking for lines for Eames and/or Joy, found the latter proverb, and absolutely had to work it in. Because I’m twelve years old, apparently.
> 
> I struggled a bit with not only where to place this, but even if I should write it at all, but here it is: a quick word on the subject of Arthur and Eames having hired domestic help for their home in Kenya. While I (like Arthur, but not like 'polyglot son-of-a-diplomat' Eames, who grew up in various former far-flung corners of the British Empire in my head-canon) have all sorts of white-guilt issues surrounding the very concept of being a privileged white person employing a person of colour living in poverty, I decided to create Joy as a character because it's entirely in keeping with where Arthur and Eames would fit in the social landscape of subsaharan Africa. They would be remarkable if they _didn't_ have a domestic employee, actually, as people of some wealth; more than that, there could even be a perception of them being particularly cheap or selfish if they _could_ obviously afford help and didn't hire any.
> 
> Also on the subject of subsaharan African culture, and because my beta was asking about it, I have to cop to the fact that Arthur and Eames have definitely not picked the easiest place in the world to be an openly gay couple. Their marriage (which, in my head-canon, was undertaken in the much more socially-liberal South Africa) would not be recognized by the Kenyan state, of course — though thankfully homosexuality is not illegal in Kenya as it is in several other African countries. That being said, I have several friends and acquaintances who have travelled/worked in Kenya as openly gay men, and the best description I've had of their experiences was "It's like the eighties," i.e. there are as many gay people as you'd expect, but the gay community is a great deal more repressed and secretive compared to today in North America, and is centred mostly in urban areas where the general atmosphere is more cosmopolitan. 
> 
> My take on Arthur and Eames in particular is that their money can buy them acceptance where prevailing social attitudes might not, and they are furthermore probably quite skilled at gathering people around them who support their family/marriage, not taking shit from people who are inclined to be assholes about the whole thing. (The privileged classes in subsaharan Africa tend to be considerably more socially liberal than the poorer communities, too, which would help.) There are three or four more reasons in my (unwritten) backstory for Eames and Arthur that they ended up choosing Kenya over some more traditional hide-out for retired criminals, but I will leave those to your imagination.


End file.
